Obligations to enforce prohibitions: On the adequacy of security policies

Obligations to enforce prohibitions: On the adequacy of security policies

Pieters, W.
Padget, J.
Dechesne, F.
Dignum, V.
Aldewereld, H.M.

Technology, Policy and Management

Engineering, Systems and Services

2013-11-26

Security policies in organisations typically take the form of obligations for the employees. However, it is often unclear what the purpose of such obligations is, and how these can be integrated in the operational processes of the organisation. This can result in policies that may be either too strong or too weak, leading to unnecessary productivity loss, or the possibility of becoming victim to attacks that exploit the weaknesses, respectively. In this paper, we propose a framework in which the security obligations of employees are linked directly to prohibitions that prevent external agents (attackers) from reaching their goals. We use graph-based and logicbased approaches to formalise and reason about such policies, and show how the framework can be used to verify correctness of the associated refinements. The framework can assist organisations in aligning security policies with their threat model.

graphs
logics
obligations
prohibitions
refinement
security policies

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:ac539eb7-7415-4670-bf53-7dad084363d3

https://doi.org/10.1145/2523514.2523526

ACM

978-1-4503-2498-4

SIN 2013: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Security of Information and Networks, Aksaray, Turkey, 26-28 November 2013

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2013 The Author(s)