Stale-safe security properties for group-based secure information sharing

Attribute staleness arises due to the physical distribution of authorization information, decision and enforcement points. This is a fundamental problem in virtually any secure distributed system in which the management and representation of authorization state is not centralized. This problem is so intrinsic, it is inevitable that access control will be based on attribute values that are stale. While it may not be practical to eliminate staleness, we can limit unsafe access decisions made based on stale subject and object attributes. In this paper, we propose and formally specify four stalesafe security properties of varying strength which limit such incorrect access decisions. We use Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) to formalize these properties making them suitable to be verified by using model checking. We show how these properties can be applied in the specific context of groupbased Secure Information Sharing (g-SIS) as defined in this paper. We specify the authorization decision/enfo...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CCS
• Authors: Ram Krishnan, Jianwei Niu, Ravi S. Sandhu, William H. Winsborough
• Keywords: Access Decisions, Attribute Staleness, Attribute Staleness Arises, CCS 2008, Security Privacy