skip to main content
10.1145/1866898.1866901acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesccsConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Cue: a framework for generating meaningful feedback in XACML

Published: 04 October 2010 Publication History

Abstract

With a number of access rules at play along with contexts in which they may or may not apply, it is not always obvious to the legitimate user what caused an authorization server to deny a request, neither is it possible for the administrator to specify a complete fail proof policy. It then becomes the responsibility of the system to act in a user friendly manner by providing feedback suggesting the requester about possible alternatives. The system should also cover any unhandled request that it may encounter due to an incomplete system policy. At the same time, it is essential for feedback to not reveal the entire policy to any user. In this paper we propose a framework Cue, for generating feedback in XACML using logic programming in Prolog. Feedback content is protected by the use of meta policy which itself is specified in XACML. We first translate XACML policies into logic based functors. Second, we execute a query using parameters in the denied XACML request, to identify conditions that failed. Third, the failed condition is notified as feedback if a meta policy allows the system to reveal it. Cue is capable of generating appropriate feedback while ensuring that a desired degree of confidentiality is maintained.

References

[1]
}}A. Anderson. A comparison of two privacy policy languages: Epal and xacml. Technical report, Mountain View, CA, USA, 2005.
[2]
}}M. Backes, M. Durmuth, and G. Karjoth. Unification in privacy policy evaluation - translating epal into prolog. Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks, IEEE International Workshop on, 0:185, 2004.
[3]
}}A. Barth, J. Mitchell, A. Datta, and S. Sundaram. Privacy and utility in business processes. In CSF '07: Proceedings of the 20th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium, pages 279--294, Washington, DC, USA, 2007. IEEE Computer Society.
[4]
}}P. Bonatti, E. Damiani, S. de Capitani, and P. Samarati. A component-based architecture for secure data publication. In ACSAC '01: Proceedings of the 17th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, page 309, Washington, DC, USA, 2001. IEEE Computer Society.
[5]
}}X. Cao and L. Iverson. Intentional access management: making access control usable for end-users. In SOUPS '06: Proceedings of the second symposium on Usable privacy and security, pages 20--31, New York, NY, USA, 2006. ACM.
[6]
}}H. Chalupsky and T. A. Russ. Whynot: debugging failed queries in large knowledge bases. In IAAI'02: Proceedings of the 14th conference on Innovative applications of artificial intelligence, pages 870--877. AAAI Press, 2002.
[7]
}}J. Crampton, W. Leung, and K. Beznosov. The secondary and approximate authorization model and its application to bell-lapadula policies. In SACMAT '06: Proceedings of the eleventh ACM symposium on Access control models and technologies, pages 111--120, New York, NY, USA, 2006. ACM.
[8]
}}T. Das, R. Bhagwan, and P. Naldurg. Baaz: A system for detecting access control misconfigurations. In USENIX Security Symposium, USENIX, 2010.
[9]
}}K. Fisler, S. Krishnamurthi, L. A. Meyerovich, and M. C. Tschantz. Verification and change-impact analysis of access-control policies. In ICSE '05. ACM Press, 2005.
[10]
}}L. Kagal, C. Hanson, and D. Weitzner. Using dependency tracking to provide explanations for policy management. In POLICY '08: Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE Workshop on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks, pages 54--61, Washington, DC, USA, 2008. IEEE Computer Society.
[11]
}}A. Kapadia, G. Sampemane, and R. H. Campbell. KNOW why your access was denied: Regulating feedback for usable security. In Proceedings of the ACM CCS, 2004.
[12]
}}A. Khurat and J. Abendroth. A mechanism for requesting hierarchical documents in xacml. Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communication, IEEE International Conference on, 0:202--207, 2008.
[13]
}}A. X. Liu, F. Chen, J. Hwang, and T. Xie. Xengine: a fast and scalable xacml policy evaluation engine. In SIGMETRICS '08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems, pages 265--276, New York, NY, USA, 2008. ACM.
[14]
}}M. Lorch, D. Kafura, S. Proctor, and R. Lepro. First experiences using xacml for access control in distributed systems. In in Proceedings of the 2003 ACM workshop on XML security, pages 25--37. ACM Press, 2003.
[15]
}}M. Lorch, D. Kafura, and S. Shah. An xacml-based policy management and authorization service for globus resources. In GRID '03: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Grid Computing, page 208, Washington, DC, USA, 2003. IEEE Computer Society.
[16]
}}L. Lymberopoulos, E. Lupu, and M. Sloman. An adaptive policy-based framework for network services management. J. Netw. Syst. Manage., 11:277--303, September 2003.
[17]
}}T. Moses. XACML Version 2.0. OASIS Standard Specification, February 2005.
[18]
}}J. H. Saltzer and M. D. Schroeder. The protection of information in computer systems. In Proceedings of the IEEE, volume 63, 1975.
[19]
}}B. Stepien, A. Felty, and S. Matwin. A Non-technical User-Oriented Display Notation for XACML Conditions. SpringerLink, 2009.
[20]
}}J. Wielemaker. An overview of the swi-prolog programming environment. In WLPE, pages 1--16, 2003.
[21]
}}C. Wolter, A. Schaad, and C. Meinel. Deriving xacml policies from business process models. In WISE'07: Proceedings of the 2007 international conference on Web information systems engineering, pages 142--153, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2007. Springer-Verlag.
[22]
}}M. E. Zurko and R. T. Simon. User-centered security. In NSPW '96: Proceedings of the 1996 workshop on New security paradigms, pages 27--33, New York, NY, USA, 1996. ACM.

Cited By

View all
  • (2018)Survey on Access Control for Community-Centered Collaborative SystemsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/314602551:1(1-38)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2018
  • (2016)Collaborative Access Decisions: Why Has My Decision Not Been Enforced?Information Systems Security10.1007/978-3-319-49806-5_6(109-130)Online publication date: 24-Nov-2016
  • (2016)Data Governance and Transparency for Collaborative SystemsData and Applications Security and Privacy XXX10.1007/978-3-319-41483-6_15(199-216)Online publication date: 2-Jul-2016
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
SafeConfig '10: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM workshop on Assurable and usable security configuration
October 2010
98 pages
ISBN:9781450300933
DOI:10.1145/1866898
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]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 04 October 2010

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. access control
  2. feedback
  3. policy protection
  4. privacy policy languages
  5. prolog
  6. usable privacy and security
  7. xacml

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

CCS '10
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 22 of 61 submissions, 36%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)3
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2
Reflects downloads up to 02 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2018)Survey on Access Control for Community-Centered Collaborative SystemsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/314602551:1(1-38)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2018
  • (2016)Collaborative Access Decisions: Why Has My Decision Not Been Enforced?Information Systems Security10.1007/978-3-319-49806-5_6(109-130)Online publication date: 24-Nov-2016
  • (2016)Data Governance and Transparency for Collaborative SystemsData and Applications Security and Privacy XXX10.1007/978-3-319-41483-6_15(199-216)Online publication date: 2-Jul-2016
  • (2011)User controllable security and privacy for mobile mashupsProceedings of the 12th Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications10.1145/2184489.2184498(35-40)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2011
  • (2011)A Framework for Managing and Analyzing Changes of Security Policies2011 IEEE International Symposium on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks10.1109/POLICY.2011.47(105-112)Online publication date: Jun-2011

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media