Factoring high level information flow specifications into low level access controls

Abstract

Low level access controls must provide efficient mechanisms for allowing or denying operations and hence are typically based on the access matrix. However, when combining the goals of efficiency along with the support for least privilege and higher level authorization properties (such as information flow confidentiality), the resulting access controls become tedious to encode. Compositional high level specifications can be much more succinct. When combined with administrative controls, they can be robust in changing what is authorized in a controlled manner. Such specifications offer the promise of being easier to configure and understand, and in fact can be automatically analyzed for authorization properties. However, there remains the issue of how to generate the low level access control configuration from the high level specification. In this paper, we describe a factoring algorithm to algorithmically translate a high level specification of information flow authorization properties into low level access controls. In addition, several optimizations are given which dramatically reduce the size of the access control configuration generated