Verification of agent knowledge in dynamic access control policies

Abstract

We develop a modeling technique based on interpreted systems in order to verify temporal-epistemic properties over access control policies. This approach enables us to detect information flow vulnerabilities in dynamic policies by verifying the knowledge of the agents gained by both reading and reasoning about system information. To overcome the practical limitations of state explosion in model-checking temporal-epistemic properties, we introduce a novel abstraction and refinement technique for temporal-epistemic safety properties in ACTLK (ACTL with knowledge modality K) and a class of interesting properties that does fall in this category.

The original version of this paper, "Model checking agent knowledge in dynamic access control policies", appeared in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), Volume 7795, 2013, pp 448-462