A Theory of Gray Security Policies

This paper generalizes traditional models of security policies, from specifications of whether programs are secure, to specifications of how secure programs are. This is a generalization from qualitative, black-and-white policies to quantitative, gray policies. Included are generalizations from traditional definitions of safety and liveness policies to definitions of gray-safety and gray-liveness policies. These generalizations preserve key properties of safety and liveness, including that the intersection of safety and liveness is a unique allow-all policy and that every policy can be written as the conjunction of a single safety and a single liveness policy. It is argued that the generalization provides several benefits, including that it serves as a unifying framework for disparate approaches to security metrics, and that it separates—in a practically useful way—specifications of how secure systems are from specifications of how secure users require their systems to be.