Errors can arise in defining and evaluating computer security policy as well as in translating computer security policy into procedures.The effect of such errors in policy upon the secure operation of information systems can impose unacceptable levels of risk from the perspective of procurers and users of information systems.Relying on computer security paradigms based solely on formal methods makes it difficult if not impossible to detect and/or reason about certain classes of threats to computer security and vulnerabilities of information systems to these threats, especially for those aspects of information systems that are more readily amenable to modeling via non-formal methods.We present a paradigm integrating formal and heuristic reasoning as a basis for testing for and debugging computer security policy.To illustrate our approach, and to support our arguments, we consider the problem of reasoning about the plans of an agent who may be trying to compromise the security of an information system.

Three significant challenges facing the discipline of software engineering are understanding how software designers reason about policy, understanding how they define requirements based on this reasoning, and providing machine-based intelligent tools that support reasoning about policy. The authors are developing the concept of a policy workbench: knowledge-based tools that support reasoning about such properties of policies as consistency, completeness, and correctness, and the implications of policy for the behavior of a system. They discuss how such a workbench might help software designers reason about the relationships between policies and requirements.>

A formal operational semantics is given for update operations on multilevel relations, i.e., relations in which individual data elements are classified at different levels. For this purpose, the familiar INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE operations of SQL are suitably generalized to cope with polyinstantiation. The authors conjecture that these operations are consistent (or sound) in that all relations which can be constructed will satisfy the basic integrity properties required of multilevel relations. They also conjecture that the operations are complete in that every multilevel relation can be constructed by some sequence of these operations.>

Article Free Access Share on Pragmatics of database management (panel session) Authors: Matthias Jarke New York University New York UniversityView Profile , Cecil S. McMinn Upjohn Pharmaceuticals Upjohn PharmaceuticalsView Profile , John Murray Immigration and Naturalization Service Immigration and Naturalization ServiceView Profile , Randall Rustin Algorithmics, Inc. Algorithmics, Inc.View Profile , Ken Sloan Applied Data Research Applied Data ResearchView Profile , Editor: Edgar H. Sibley George Mason University George Mason UniversityView Profile Authors Info & Claims SIGMOD '85: Proceedings of the 1985 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of dataMay 1985 Pages 232–234https://doi.org/10.1145/318898.318920Published:01 May 1985Publication History 0citation197DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads197Last 12 Months7Last 6 weeks2 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my Alerts New Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF