Finished Projects
Security Infrastructure
AMBer: Security Policy Automation, Modeling, and Bridging
SPARTA ISSO is improving security for collaborating organizations. The AMBer project addresses security for dynamic coalitions' dynamically formed and evolving federations of organizations. Coalition member organizations join together to cooperatively address joint goals. To accomplish those goals, the organizations must often share information system resources. SPARTA ISSO is developing techniques and technologies to ensure that the coalition security policies that describe information sharing among coalition members are accurate, unambiguous, and correctly enforced.
Coalitions are formed by autonomous organizations, each of which has its own objectives and security policy. In forming a coalition, the member organizations must establish cooperative goals and a coalition security policy. The formation of a coalition security policy is a particularly difficult task, as the objectives and policies of the member organizations may be ambiguous, incomplete, or even inconsistent when applied to the coalition environment. The complexity of coalition policy formation is exacerbated by dynamism in coalition membership, coalition goals and task requirements, resources to be shared, and the trust relationships among member organizations.
To support rapid coalition formation and evolution, SPARTA ISSO is developing security policy models to express the needs and metaphors of collaborative environments. In particular, we are extending two access control models to reflect the needs of collaborative environments: team-based and task-based access control. Team-based controls allow users, in a variety of roles, to come together dynamically and be granted access to specific resources for a limited period of time. Task-based controls allow access permissions to be specified at the level of a task, and allow those permissions to be modified in concert with the evolving state of the task. SPARTA ISSO's new models will enable coalition members to express naturally the collaborative requirements of their coalition.
A correct implementation of an access control model requires that access policies be accurately reflected in authorizations. Unfortunately, the semantics of an authorization granted by one organization may be badly misunderstood or improperly implemented within a coalition environment. To ensure accurate authorization understanding and implementation, SPARTA ISSO is developing a common authorization policy framework for capturing coalition policy meta-data and ontology-based policy representations for expressing semantic relationships with coalition policy. These techniques will enable coalition members to express the semantics of authorizations that will be shared during collaborative work. Each member organization will also document relationships between its local authorizations and the semantics of coalition authorizations. SPARTA ISSO's techniques for specifying and sharing accurate and consistent authorization semantics will enable collaborating organizations to bridge heterogeneous policies and effectively control the resources that they share.
Future Work
Once a solid conceptual basis has been established for understanding
coalition access control policies, the practical problems of creating
such policies come to fore. In particular, the complexity of developing
fine-grained access policies has made the policy development process
exceptionally time-consuming, prone to error, and difficult to manage
over time. The policy administration problems are magnified in a
coalition environment, as each coalition member must manage changes in
both local and coalition policies. Automation of the policy creation,
projection and translation processes is necessary to address the many
issues arising from policy complexity. In the future, SPARTA ISSO will
address these three processes by developing semi-automatic mechanisms to
assist software developers and administrators in producing enclave and
coalition access policies.
Research Focus
Security Policies for Coalition Environments
As collaborative work and business relationships develop, enabled by
tremendous network connectivity, the need to secure collaborative
computing environments becomes critical. Users need access to coalition
partner's computing resources and policies must be developed to identify
which accesses are acceptable. The AMBer project is developing
coalition-targeted access control models to support the development of
access control policies for collaborative environments.
When users request access to coalition partner's resources, they must provide evidence (usually carried by digital certificates) of their authorizations. Effective access control within coalition computing environments is critically dependent on establishing a common understanding of authorization semantics. TheAMBer project is developing a common authorization policy framework to ensure common authorization semantics throughout a coalition-computing environment.
Additional Information
Contact Calvin Ko (Calvin.Ko@SPARTA.com),
or visit our Web page.