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Shadowed Authorization Policies - A Disaster Waiting to Happen?

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Abstract

Information security has been in the mainstream of computing for the last few decades and our increasing reliance on the large scale distributed systems, such as the Cloud, has put greater emphasis on the security capabilities of these systems. The security concerns are amongst the important factors affecting adoption of Cloud. This paper identifies and addresses issues concerning management of hierarchical authorization policies in the Cloud. These policy models pose the risk of policy shadowing where the decision taken at higher levels mask the possibly erroneous or conflicting policies specification at the lower levels. We introduce the notion of shadowed policies and present a model which is based on formal Event-Calculus (EC); for the identification of shadowed policies. The results show that our proposed approach is scalable and practical.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://decreasoner.sourceforge.net.

  2. 2.

    Complete models along with setup and execution instructions are available at https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/0E4u-NuXGiGkpoql5BMamWhGQ#wise19.

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Correspondence to Ehtesham Zahoor , Uzma Bibi or Olivier Perrin .

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Zahoor, E., Bibi, U., Perrin, O. (2019). Shadowed Authorization Policies - A Disaster Waiting to Happen?. In: Cheng, R., Mamoulis, N., Sun, Y., Huang, X. (eds) Web Information Systems Engineering – WISE 2019. WISE 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11881. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34223-4_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34223-4_22

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-34223-4

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