A Comprehensive Formal Solution for Access Control Policies Management: Defect Detection, Analysis and Risk Assessment

Nowadays, the access control is becoming increasingly important for open, ubiquitous and critical systems. Nonetheless, efficient Administration, Management, Safety analysis and Risk assessment (AMSR) are recognized as fundamental and crucial challenges in todays access control infrastructures. In untrustworthy environment, the administration of an access control policy, which is a main security aspect, generally raises a critical analysis problem when the administration is distributed and/or potentially un-trusted users contribute to this process. Consequently, collusions attempts and inner threats may take place to generate crucial and invisible breaches to circumvent the policy. To address this issue, we introduce a rigorous and comprehensive solution for an efficient and secure management of access control policies. Our proposal gives a high visibility on the development process of an access control policy and allows in an elegant manner to detect, analyze and assess the risk associated to the policy defects. The strength of our proposal is that it relies on logic-like formalisms to ensure a high surety by verifying the correctness and the completeness of our formal reasoning. We rely on an example to illustrate the relevance of the proposal.