Access control policies (ACPs) are necessary mechanisms for protection of critical resources and applications. As operational and security requirements of a system evolve, so do access control policies. It is important to help policy authors in effectively managing access control policies by providing insights into historical trends and evolution patterns of access control policies. We analyzed ACP evolution in three systems: Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) operating system, Virtual Computing Laboratory (VCL) cloud, and a network intrusion detection (Snort) application. We propose an approach, which extracts evolution patterns based on the analysis of ACP historical change data. An evolution pattern indicates an abstraction of change in the permissions/privileges assigned to a group or a user. We then developed a model of ACPs evolution. We found eight frequently occurring evolution patterns across the three systems. In our context this model can predict evolution patterns in ACPs with a precision of 50-80%, a recall of 70-90% and an F-measure of 65-75%.

As security requirements of software often change, developers may modify security policies such as access control policies (policies in short) according to evolving requirements. To increase confidence that the modification of policies is correct, developers conduct regression testing. However, rerunning all of existing system test cases could be costly and time-consuming. To address this issue, we develop a regression-test-selection approach, which selects every system test case that may reveal regression faults caused by policy changes. Our evaluation results show that our test-selection approach reduces a substantial number of system test cases efficiently.

In order to facilitate managing authorization, access control architectures are designed to separate the business logic from an access control policy. To determine whether a user can access which resources, a request is formulated from a component, called a Policy Enforcement Point (PEP) located in application code. Given a request, a Policy Decision Point (PDP) evaluates the request against an access control policy and returns its access decision (i.e., permit or deny) to the PEP. With the growth of sensitive information for protection in an application, an access control policy consists of a larger number of rules, which often cause a performance bottleneck. To address this issue, we propose to refactor access control policies for performance improvement by splitting a policy (handled by a single PDP) into its corresponding multiple policies with a smaller number of rules (handled by multiple PDPs). We define seven attribute-set-based splitting criteria to facilitate splitting a policy. We have conducted an evaluation on three subjects of real-life Java systems, each of which interacts with access control policies. Our evaluation results show that (1) our approach preserves the initial architectural model in terms of interaction between the business logic and its corresponding rules in a policy, and (2) our approach enables to substantially reduce request evaluation time for most splitting criteria.

Firewalls are critical components of network security and have been widely deployed for protecting private networks. A firewall determines whether to accept or discard a packet that passes through it based on its policy. However, most real-life firewalls have been plagued with policy faults, which either allow malicious traffic or block legitimate traffic. Due to the complexity of firewall policies, manually locating the faults of a firewall policy and further correcting them are difficult. Automatically correcting the faults of a firewall policy is an important and challenging problem. In this article, we first propose a fault model for firewall policies including five types of faults. For each type of fault, we present an automatic correction technique. Second, we propose the first systematic approach that employs these five techniques to automatically correct all or part of the misclassified packets of a faulty firewall policy. Third, we conducted extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. Experimental results show that our approach is effective to correct a faulty firewall policy with three of these types of faults.

Firewalls are the mainstay of enterprise security and the most widely adopted technology for protecting private networks. As the quality of protection provided by a firewall directly depends on the quality of its policy (i.e., configuration), ensuring the correctness of firewall policies is important and yet difficult. To help ensure the correctness, we propose a systematic structural testing approach for firewall policies. We define structural coverage (based on coverage criteria of rules, predicates, and clauses) on the firewall policy under test. To achieve high structural coverage effectively, we have developed four automated packet generation techniques: the random packet generation, the one based on local constraint solving (considering individual rules locally in a policy), the one based on global constraint solving (considering multiple rules globally in a policy), and the one based on boundary values. We have conducted an experiment on a set of real policies and a set of faulty policies to detect faults with generated packet sets. Generally, our experimental results show that a packet set with higher structural coverage has higher fault-detection capability (i.e., detecting more injected faults). Our experimental results show that a reduced packet set (maintaining the same level of structural coverage with the corresponding original packet set) maintains similar fault-detection capability with the original set.

Mandatory access control (MAC) mechanisms control which users or processes have access to which resources in a system. MAC policies are increasingly specified to facilitate managing and maintaining access control. However, the correct specification of the policies is a very challenging problem. To formally and precisely capture the security properties that MAC should adhere to, MAC models are usually written to bridge the rather wide gap in abstraction between policies and mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a general approach for property verification for MAC models. The approach defines a standardized structure for MAC models, providing for both property verification and automated generation of test cases. The approach expresses MAC models in the specification language of a model checker and expresses generic access control properties in the property language. Then the approach uses the model checker to verify the integrity, coverage, and confinement of these properties for the MAC models and finally generates test cases via combinatorial covering array for the system implementations of the models.

Most prior research on policies has focused on correctness. While correctness is an important issue, the adoption of policy-based computing may be limited if the resulting systems are not implemented efficiently and thus perform poorly. To increase the effectiveness and adoption of policy-based computing, in this paper, we propose fast policy evaluation algorithms that can be adapted to support various policy languages. In this paper, we focus on XACML policy evaluation because XACML has become the de facto standard for specifying access control policies, has been widely used on web servers, and is most complex among existing policy languages. We implemented our algorithms in a policy evaluation system called XEngine and conducted side-by-side comparison with Sun Policy Decision Point (PDP), the industrial standard for XACML policy evaluation. The results show that XEngine is orders of magnitude faster than Sun PDP. The performance difference grows almost linearly with the number of rules in an XACML policy. To our best knowledge, there is no prior work on improving XACML policy evaluation performance. This paper represents the first step in exploring this unknown space.

Firewalls are the mainstay of enterprise security and the most widely adopted technology for protecting private networks. Ensuring the correctness of firewall policies through testing is important. In firewall policy testing, test inputs are packets and test outputs are decisions. Packets with unexpected (expected) evaluated decisions are classified as failed (passed) tests. Given failed tests together with passed tests, policy testers need to debug the policy to detect fault locations (such as faulty rules). Such a process is often time-consuming.To help reduce effort on detecting fault locations, we propose an approach to reduce the number of rules for inspection based on information collected during evaluating failed tests. Our approach ranks the reduced rules to decide which rules should be inspected first. We performed experiments on applying our approach. The empirical results show that our approach can reduce 56% of rules that are required for inspection in fault localization.

Access control policies are often specified in declarative languages. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, called mutation verification, to assess the quality of properties specified for a policy and, in doing so, the quality of the verification itself. In our approach, given a policy and a set of properties, we first mutate the policy to generate various mutant policies, each with a single seeded fault. We then verify whether the properties hold for each mutant policy. If the properties still hold for a given mutant policy, then the quality of these properties is determined to be insufficient in guarding against the seeded fault, indicating that more properties are needed to augment the existing set of properties to provide higher confidence of the policy correctness. We have implemented Mutaver, a mutation verification tool for XACML, and applied it to policies and properties from a real-world software system.

XACML has become the de facto standard for specifying access control policies for various applications, especially web services. With the explosive growth of web applications deployed on the Internet, XACML policies grow rapidly in size and complexity, which leads to longer request processing time. This paper concerns the performance of request processing, which is a critical issue and so far has been overlooked by the research community. In this paper, we propose XEngine, a scheme for efficient XACML policy evaluation. XEngine first converts a textual XACML policy to a numerical policy. Second, it converts a numerical policy with complex structures to a numerical policy with a normalized structure. Third, it converts the normalized numerical policy to tree data structures for efficient processing of requests. To evaluate the performance of XEngine, we conducted extensive experiments on both real-life and synthetic XACML policies. The experimental results show that XEngine is orders of magnitude more efficient than Sun PDP, and the performance difference between XEngine and Sun PDP grows almost linearly with the number of rules in XACML policies. For XACML policies of small sizes (with hundreds of rules), XEngine is one to two orders of magnitude faster than the widely deployed Sun PDP. For XACML policies of large sizes (with thousands of rules), XEngine is three to four orders of magnitude faster than Sun PDP.

Firewalls are the mainstay of enterprise security and the most widely adopted technology for protecting private networks. As the quality of protection provided by a firewall directly depends on the quality of its policy (i.e., configuration), ensuring the correctness of security policies is important and yet difficult.To help ensure the correctness of a firewall policy, we propose a systematic structural testing approach for firewall policies. We define structural coverage (based on coverage criteria of rules, predicates, and clauses) on the policy under test. Considering achieving higher structural coverage effectively, we develop three automated packet generation techniques: the random packet generation, the one based on local constraint solving (considering individual rules locally in a policy), and the most sophisticated one based on global constraint solving (considering multiple rules globally in a policy).We have conducted an experiment on a set of real policies and a set of faulty policies to detect faults with generated packet sets. Generally, our experimental results show that a packet set with higher structural coverage has higher fault detection capability (i.e., detecting more injected faults). Our experimental results show that a reduced packet set (maintaining the same level of structural coverage with the corresponding original packet set) maintains similar fault detection capability with the original set.

Access control is one of the most fundamental and widely used security mechanisms. Access control mechanisms control which principals such as users or processes have access to which resources in a system. To facilitate managing and maintaining access control, access control policies are increasingly written in specification languages such as XACML. The specification of access control policies itself is often a challenging problem. Furthermore, XACML is intentionally designed to be generic: it provides the freedom in describing access control policies, which are well-known or invented ones. But the flexibility and expressiveness provided by XACML come at the cost of complexity, verbosity, and lack of desirable-property enforcement. Often common properties for specific access control policies may not be satisfied when these policies are specified in XACML, causing the discrepancy between what the policy authors intend to specify and what the actually specified XACML policies reflect. In this position paper, we propose an approach for conducting conformance checking of access control policies specified in XACML based on existing verification and testing tools for XACML policies.