Language based policy analysis in a SPKI Trust Management System

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Eamani, Arun K. | Sistla, A. Prasad

Affiliations: University of Illinois at Chicago, USA. E-mail: aeamani@cs.uic.edu, sistla@cs.uic.edu

Abstract: SPKI/SDSI is a standard for issuing authorization and name certificates. SPKI/SDSI can be used to implement a Trust Management System, where the policy for resource access is distributively specified by multiple trusted entities. Agents in the system need a formal mechanism for understanding the current state of policy. We present a first order temporal logic, called FTPL for specifying properties of a given SPKI/SDSI policy state. We also present algorithms to check if a SPKI/SDSI policy state satisfies a property specified in FTPL.

Keywords: Simple public key infrastructure (SPKI), simple distributed security infrastructure (SDSI), trust management system, policy analysis, temporal logic, access control, security properties

DOI: 10.3233/JCS-2006-14402

Journal: Journal of Computer Security, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 327-357, 2006