Provisions and Obligations in Policy Management and Security Applications

Policies are widely used in many systems and applications. Recently, it has been recognized that a "yes/no" response to every scenario is just not enough for many modern systems and applications. Many policies require certain conditions to be satisfied and actions to be performed before or after a decision is made. To address this need, this paper introduces the notions of provisions and obligations. Provisions are those conditions that need to be satisfied or actions that must be performed before a decision is rendered, while obligations are those conditions or actions that must be fulfilled by either the users or the system after the decision. This paper formalizes a rule-based policy framework that includes provisions and obligations, and investigates a reasoning mechanism within this framework. A policy decision may be supported by more than one derivation, each associated with a potentially different set of provisions and obligations (called a global PO set). The reason...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: VLDB
• Authors: Claudio Bettini, Sushil Jajodia, Xiaoyang Sean Wang, Duminda Wijesekera
• Keywords: Database, Global Po, Policy Decision, Reasoning Mechanism, VLDB 2002