A framework for managing data provider and data consumer semantic obligations for access control

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Marfia, Fabio^{; *} | Fornara, Nicoletta | Nguyen, Truc-Vien T.

Affiliations: Università della Svizzera italiana, via G. Buffi 13, 6900 Lugano, Switzerland. E-mails: fabio.marfia@usi.ch, nicoletta.fornara@usi.ch, thi.truc.vien.nguyen@usi.ch

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. E-mail: fabio.marfia@usi.ch.

Abstract: Norms and policies are a fundamental component of nowadays open distributed systems operating on the Internet, and a crucial application is the field of Access Control. In such context, policies have been widely used to express data consumer permissions and prohibitions to get access to certain data, whereas obligations have been modelled and applied more infrequently. In this paper, we present a unified semantic model for specifying data consumer and data provider obligations in the context of an exchange of logically formalized information between agents, inside a Multiagent System. We explain how to specify those obligations, in a formal way; we present how to enforce the data provider obligations on the data released by the agent before returning it to the data consumer; we show how to monitor the fulfilment or violation of the specified data consumer obligations; all of that in the context of a complete reasoning-based obligation framework.

Keywords: Obligation, description logics, reasoning, access control, semantic web, OWL

DOI: 10.3233/AIC-170725

Journal: AI Communications, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 67-82, 2017