Automated Certification of Authorisation Policy Resistance
This addresses security vulnerabilities in ABAC for open and distributed systems, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing formal language PTaCL.
The paper tackles the problem of attribute hiding attacks in Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC) by introducing policy resistance and developing the tool ATRAP, which automatically searches for counter-examples and proofs of resistance using Maude and Isabelle, with performance evaluation provided.
Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC) extends traditional Access Control by considering an access request as a set of pairs attribute name-value, making it particularly useful in the context of open and distributed systems, where security relevant information can be collected from different sources. However, ABAC enables attribute hiding attacks, allowing an attacker to gain some access by withholding information. In this paper, we first introduce the notion of policy resistance to attribute hiding attacks. We then propose the tool ATRAP (Automatic Term Rewriting for Authorisation Policies), based on the recent formal ABAC language PTaCL, which first automatically searches for resistance counter-examples using Maude, and then automatically searches for an Isabelle proof of resistance. We illustrate our approach with two simple examples of policies and propose an evaluation of ATRAP performances.