A State Transition Model for Policy Specification

The model of policies used in a variety of computer systems management and security domains has typically followed the paradigm of if-then-else statements. While the use of such statements has resulted in significant progress in the field of policy based systems, their use has also entailed significant effort in defining the policy rules and system models needed for employing policy based technologies. Better models of policy specification can ease some of the difficulties associated with building policy based systems. In this paper, we introduce a new model for specifying policies, based on a user defined state transition diagram describing system behavior, and demonstrate how this model can be employed advantageously in managing policies.