At 11:22 -0400 16/4/98, Bill_Roydsat_private wrote: >One problem that a needs to be addressed is a "Security Policy Language" >which would be a formal notation for writing security policies that would >be both >explainable to managers and executives and verifiable in a formal sense. >There has been work done on this in programming language verification >(Euclid and stuff from late 70's) but it ended up being too "mathematical" >for real world use. The tradeoff between ease of use and completnenss has >always been one of the deisgn problems in all computer software. It is a >hard problem as any firewall make can tell you. If you make a nice >friendly GUI to sell the product, it becomes an obstacle to actually using >the product in daily business. See also a paper "Specifying a Security Policy: A Case Study" by FreŽdeŽric Cuppens and Claire Saurel, ONERA-CERT, France (sorry forget URL but it should be somewhere on theirs site) This is taken from Abstract: The objective of this paper is to assist the security admin-istrators, in their attempt to specify, define and formalize security policies suited to a given high risk environment. It is then possible for the administrators to automatically derive consequencies of these policies. In particular, we want to provide users with the following functionalities: Query a given security policy. Verify that properties such as consistency and com-pleteness are enforced by a given policy. Verify that a given situation does not violate the security policy. Investigate interoperability problems between several security policies. Cheers, Gaus --------------------------------------------------------------- EuroCERT tel: (+44 1235) 822 382 c/o UKERNA fax: (+44 1235) 822 398 Atlas Centre Chilton, Didcot Oxfordshire OX11 0QS, UK
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