2011-05-25

Safe Co-Evolution of Models and Access Control Policies

by: Qin Zhang

Abstract: The access control is becoming a mandatory feature for most systems due to the importance for preserving confidentiality and safety both of clients and internal privacy. A challenging problem is to manage system functionality and access control policy during its evolution.
 
In this paper, we develop a theory of safety co-evolution of models (behavioral description of the system) and access control policies (expressing permissions and prohibitions). We propose a mapping mechanism from access control policies to model properties, safety and reachability, and techniques for property preservation during model evolution process. Thus our proposal allows the incremental modification of the behavioral and access control concerns, with safe mechanism to guarantee that permissions and prohibitions are invariant when the system evolves.

Bio: Qin ZHANG is a PhD candidate at LASSY group of Faculty of Sciences, Technologies and Communications of the University of Luxembourg and SMV group of Faculty of Information Science and Technology of University of Geneva (involved in a joint research project) since 2010.
 
He has a M.Sc degree in Computer Science and Engineering from U.Aizu (Japan) and a M.Eng degree in Software Engineering from HIT (China). His main research interests are software modeling and verification and resilience engineering.