Title
Analyzing XACML policies using answer set programming
Abstract
With the tremendous growth of Web applications and services, eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) has been broadly adopted to specify Web access control policies. However, when the policies are large or defined by multiple authorities, it has proved difficult to analyze errors and vulnerabilities in a manual fashion. Recent advances in the answer set programming (ASP) paradigm have provided a powerful problem-solving formalism that is capable of dealing with policy verification. In this paper, we employ ASP to analyze various properties of XACML policies. To this end, we first propose a structured mechanism to translate a XACML policy into an ASP program. Then, we leverage the features of off-the-shelf ASP solvers to specify and verify a wide range of properties of a XACML policy, including redundancy, conflicts, refinement, completeness, reachability, and usefulness. We present an empirical evaluation of the effectiveness and efficiency of a policy analysis tool implemented on top of the Clingo ASP solver. The evaluation results show that our approach is computationally more efficient compared with existing approaches.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1007/s10207-018-0421-5
International Journal of Information Security
Keywords
Field
DocType
XACML,Policy analysis,Anomaly detection,Answer set programming
Software engineering,Computer science,Policy analysis,XACML,Theoretical computer science,Redundancy (engineering),Access control,Solver,Web application,Answer set programming,Markup language
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
18
4
1615-5270
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.38
23
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mohsen Rezvani18211.39
David Rajaratnam2456.87
Aleksandar Ignjatovic355649.24
Maurice Pagnucco435740.74
Sanjay Jha51745157.12