Paper Info
Title
The Foundational Work of Harrison-Ruzzo-Ullman Revisited
Abstract
The work by Harrison, Ruzzo, and Ullman (the HRU paper) on safety in the context of the access matrix model is widely considered to be foundational work in access control. In this paper, we address two errors we have discovered in the HRU paper. To our knowledge, these errors have not been previously reported in the literature. The first error regards a proof that shows that safety analysis for mono-operational HRU systems is in {\bf NP}. The error stems from a faulty assumption that such systems are monotonic for the purpose of safety analysis. We present a corrected proof in this paper. The second error regards a mapping from one version of the safety problem to another that is presented in the HRU paper. We demonstrate that the mapping is not a reduction, and present a reduction that enables us to infer that the second version of safety introduced in the HRU paper is also undecidable for the HRU scheme. These errors lead us to ask whether the notion of safety as defined in the HRU paper is meaningful. We introduce other notions of safety that we argue have more intuitive appeal, and present the corresponding safety analysis results for the HRU scheme.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1109/TDSC.2012.77
IEEE Trans. Dependable Sec. Comput.
Keywords
Field
DocType
access control,safety problem,harrison-ruzzo-ullman revisited,corresponding safety analysis result,foundational work,hru scheme,hru paper,mono-operational hru system,safety analysis,access matrix model,corrected proof,computational complexity,computational modeling,authorisation,computer security
Monotonic function,Matrix model,Ask price,Computer science,Authorization,Theoretical computer science,Access control,Computational complexity theory,Undecidable problem
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
10
1
1545-5971
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
6
0.49
19
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mahesh V. Tripunitara155833.06
Ninghui Li25863305.02