Checking Security Policy Compliance

TL;DR

This paper introduces a framework for verifying that low-level security policies comply with high-level organizational security policies using refinement calculus and metadata.

Contribution

It presents a novel compliance checking framework that models security policies and their refinement, enabling detection of violations and conflicts.

Findings

Framework effectively detects policy violations

Supports refinement from high-level to low-level policies

Capable of identifying conflicts and obligations

Abstract

Ensuring compliance of organizations to federal regulations is a growing concern. This paper presents a framework and methods to verify whether an implemented low-level security policy is compliant to a high-level security policy. Our compliance checking framework is based on organizational and security metadata to support refinement of high-level concepts to implementation specific instances. Our work uses the results of refinement calculus to express valid refinement patterns and their properties. Intuitively, a low-level security policy is compliant to a high-level security policy if there is a valid refinement path from the high-level security policy to the low-level security policy. Our model is capable of detecting violations of security policies, failures to meet obligations, and capability and modal conflicts.