Security Engineering of Lattice-Based Policies

This paper describes an algebraic approach to the security engineering of lattice policies. The approach extends earlier lattice and algebraic work [13, 20, 24], and has two main goals. First, it seeks to model access control policies with anti-symmetry, reflexivity and transitivity exceptions using a lattice, and to propose an information flow security definition for the resulting set (POL) of policies. Second, it supports a constructive approach to policy specification through an algebraic structure (POL, AND, OR, NOT, , ). This structure is homomorphic to Boolean algebra. The approach’s goals and design decisions are influenced by the context in which it is being used: a library of reusable security components with tools to facilitate their reuse for securing application systems.