SecPAL

SecPAL is a declarative, logic-based, security policy language that has been developed to support the complex access control requirements of large scale distributed computing environments. [1]

Common access control requirements

Here is a partial-list of some of the challenges that SecPAL addresses:

  • How does an organization establish a fine-grained trust relationship with another organization across organizational boundaries?
  • How does a user delegate a subset of a user’s rights (constrained delegation) to another user residing either in the same organization or in a different organization?
  • How can access control policy be authored and reviewed in a manner that is human readable - allowing auditors and non-technical people to understand such policies?
  • How does an organization support compliance regulations requiring that a system be able to demonstrate exactly why it was that a user was granted access to a resource?
  • How can policies be authored, composed and evaluated in a manner that is efficient, deterministic and tractable?
gollark: The 500W one?
gollark: Oh, good.
gollark: I think there may actually have been instances of drivers for random cosmetic gimmicks like that having exploitable security issues.
gollark: RGB means you enjoy the *fun* of random CPU-wasting incompatible RGB control programs.
gollark: Also, it might be sensible to get cheaper non-RGB RAM.

References
  1. Microsoft Research

The SecPAL Research homepage includes links to the following papers which describe the architecture of SecPAL at varying levels of abstraction.

  • SecPAL Formal Model ("Design and Semantics of a Decentralized Authorization Language") – Formal description of the abstract types, language semantics and evaluation rules that support deterministic evaluation in efficient time.
  • SecPAL Schema Specification – Specification describing a practical XML based implementation of the formal model targeted at supporting access control requirements of distributed applications
  • .NET Research Implementation of SecPAL – C# implementation, C# samples for common authz patterns, and comprehensive developer documentation and a getting started tutorial

Additional research
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