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EON: modeling and analyzing dynamic access control systems with logic programs

Published: 27 October 2008 Publication History

Abstract

We present EON, a logic-programming language and tool that can be used to model and analyze dynamic access control systems. Our language extends Datalog with some carefully designed constructs that allow the introduction and transformation of new relations. For example, these constructs can model the creation of processes and objects, and the modification of their security labels at runtime. The information-flow properties of such systems can be analyzed by asking queries in this language. We show that query evaluation in EON can be reduced to decidable query satisfiability in a fragment of Datalog, and further, under some restrictions, to efficient query evaluation in Datalog.
We implement these reductions in our tool, and demonstrate its scope through several case studies.
In particular, we study in detail the dynamic access control models of the Windows Vista and Asbestos operating systems. We also automatically prove the security of a webserver running on Asbestos.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CCS '08: Proceedings of the 15th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
October 2008
590 pages
ISBN:9781595938107
DOI:10.1145/1455770
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 27 October 2008

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Author Tags

  1. automatic verification
  2. dynamic access control
  3. logic programming

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CCS '08 Paper Acceptance Rate 51 of 280 submissions, 18%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,261 of 6,999 submissions, 18%

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Cited By

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  • (2019)CMCAPProceedings of the 24th ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies10.1145/3322431.3325414(207-212)Online publication date: 28-May-2019
  • (2018)iOracleProceedings of the 2018 on Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3196494.3196527(117-131)Online publication date: 29-May-2018
  • (2014)Evaluating and comparing the quality of access control in different operating systemsComputers and Security10.1016/j.cose.2014.05.00147:C(26-40)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2014
  • (2013)Quantitatively Measure Access Control Mechanisms across Different Operating SystemsProceedings of the 2013 IEEE 7th International Conference on Software Security and Reliability10.1109/SERE.2013.12(50-59)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2013
  • (2013)Analysis of Communicating Authorization PoliciesSecurity and Trust Management10.1007/978-3-642-38004-4_7(97-112)Online publication date: 2013
  • (2013)Modeling and Checking the Security of DIFC System ConfigurationsAutomated Security Management10.1007/978-3-319-01433-3_2(21-38)Online publication date: 17-Sep-2013
  • (2012)An operating system for the homeProceedings of the 9th USENIX conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/2228298.2228332(25-25)Online publication date: 25-Apr-2012
  • (2012)Foundations of Dynamic Access ControlInformation Systems Security10.1007/978-3-642-35130-3_4(44-58)Online publication date: 2012
  • (2011)PosterProceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Computer and communications security10.1145/2046707.2093515(873-876)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2011
  • (2011)SEALProceedings of the 16th ACM symposium on Access control models and technologies10.1145/1998441.1998454(83-92)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2011
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