|
Published Articles >> Table of Contents >> Abstract
16th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop (CSFW'03)
p. 187
Using First-Order Logic to Reason about Policies
Joseph Y. Halpern, Cornell University
Vicky Weissman, Cornell University
Full Article Text:
  
DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/CSFW.2003.1212713
Send link to a friend
| Abstract |
|
A policy describes the conditions under which an action is permitted or forbidden. We show that a fragment of (multi-sorted) .rst-order logic can be used to represent and reason about policies. Because we use first-order logic, policies have a clear syntax and semantics. We show that further restricting the fragment results in a language that is still quite expressive yet is also tractable. More precisely, questions about entailment, such as ‘May Alice access the file?’, can be answered in time that is a low-order polynomial (indeed, almost linear in some cases), as can questions about the consistency of policy sets. We also give a brief overview of a prototype that we have built whose reasoning engine is based on the logic and whose interface is designed for non-logicians, allowing them to enter both policies and background information, such as ‘Alice is a student’, and to ask questions about the policies.
|
 Additional Information
|
Citation:
Joseph Y. Halpern, Vicky Weissman,
"Using First-Order Logic to Reason about Policies,"
csfw,
p. 187,
16th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop (CSFW'03),
2003
|
|
