Title
Stale-safe security properties for group-based secure information sharing
Abstract
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 are not globally synchronized. This problem is so intrinsic, it is inevitable that access decision 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 stale-safe 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, for example, using model checking. We show how these properties can be applied in the specific context of group-based Secure Information Sharing (g-SIS) as defined in this paper. We specify the authorization decision/enforcement points of the g-SIS system as a Finite State Machine (FSM) and show how this FSM can be modified so as to satisfy one of the stale-safe properties.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1145/1456396.1456402
FMSE
Keywords
Field
DocType
stale-safe security property,incorrect access decision,group-based secure information sharing,access decision,attribute value,authorization decision,authorization state,enforcement point,fundamental problem,authorization information,attribute staleness,unsafe access decision,model checking,satisfiability,finite state machine
Model checking,Computer security,Computer science,Authorization,Linear temporal logic,Finite-state machine,Enforcement,Security properties,Information sharing,Instrumental and intrinsic value,Distributed computing
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
14
0.84
28
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ram Krishnan143428.81
Jianwei Niu227526.61
Ravi S. Sandhu37665797.90
William H. Winsborough41909127.02