The Challenge of Access Control Policies Quality

Access Control policies allow one to control data sharing among multiple subjects. For high assurance data security, it is critical that such policies be fit for their purpose. In this paper we introduce the notion of “policy quality” and elaborate on its many dimensions, such as consistency, completeness, and minimality. We introduce a framework supporting the analysis of policies with respect to the introduced quality dimensions and elaborate on research challenges, including policy analysis for large-scale distributed systems, assessment of policy correctness, and analysis of policies expressed in richer policy models.