Formal Verification of Usage Control Models: A Case Study of UseCON Using TLA+
This work addresses the problem of ensuring correctness in usage control models for security and access management, but it is incremental as it focuses on a specific case study.
The paper tackled the complexity and error-prone nature of defining usage control models by applying formal verification to the UseCON model using TLA+, verifying its correctness for up to 12 uses in both authorization models.
Usage control models provide an integration of access control, digital rights, and trust management. To achieve this integration, usage control models support additional concepts such as attribute mutability and continuity of decision. However, these concepts may introduce an additional level of complexity to the underlying model, rendering its definition a cumbersome and prone to errors process. Applying a formal verification technique allows for a rigorous analysis of the interactions amongst the components, and thus for formal guarantees in respect of the correctness of a model. In this paper, we elaborate on a case study, where we express the high-level functional model of the UseCON usage control model in the TLA+ formal specification language, and verify its correctness for <=12 uses in both of its supporting authorisation models.