Policy, Models, and Trust

Security Policy
A security policy is a well-defined set of rules that include the following:
Subjects: the agents who interact with the system, which could be defined in
terms of specific individuals or in terms of roles or ranks that groups of
individuals might hold within an organization.
Individuals could be identified by their names or by their job titles, like President,
CEO, or CFO. Groups could be defined using terms such as users, administrators,
generals, majors, faculty, deans, managers, and administrative assistants. This
category also includes outsiders, such as attackers and guests.

Objects: the informational and computational resources that a security

policy is designed to protect and manage.
Examples include critical documents, files, and databases, and computational
resources include servers, workstations, and software.

Actions: the things that subjects may or may not do with respect to the
objects.
Examples include the reading and writing of documents, updating software on a
web server, and accessing the contents of a database.

Permissions: mappings between subjects, actions, and objects, which clearly

state what kinds of actions are allowed or disallowed.
Protections: the specific security features or rules that are included in the
policy to help achieve particular security goals, such as confidentiality,
integrity, availability, or anonymity.
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Security Models
A security model is an abstraction that
provides a conceptual language for
administrators to specify security policies.
Typically, security models define
hierarchies of access or modification rights
that members of an organization can have,
so that subjects in an organization can
easily be granted specific rights based on
the position of these rights in the
hierarchy.
Examples include military classifications of
access rights for documents based on
concepts like unclassified, confidential,
secret, and top secret.

U.S. government image in the public domain.

Discretionary Access Control

Discretionary access control, or DAC, refers
to a scheme where users are given the
ability to determine the permissions
governing access to their own files.
DAC typically features the concept of both users
and groups, and allows users to set accesscontrol measures in terms of these categories.
In addition, DAC schemes allow users to grant
privileges on resources to other users on the
same system.
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Mandatory Access Control

Mandatory access control is a more restrictive
scheme that does not allow users to define
permissions on files, regardless of ownership.
Instead, security decisions are made by a
central policy administrator.
Each security rule consists of a subject, which
represents the party attempting to gain access, an
object, referring to the resource being accessed,
and a series of permissions that define the extent
to which that resource can be accessed.

Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux)

incorporates mandatory access control.
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Trust Management
A trust management system is a formal
framework for specifying security policy in a
precise language, which is usually a type of
logic or programming language, together with
a mechanism for ensuring that the specified
policy is enforced.
A trust management system consists of two
main components:
a policy language
a compliance checker

Policy rules are specified in the policy

language and are enforced by the compliance
ce
checker.
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Trust Management Systems

A trust management system
typically has rules describing:
Actions: operations with securityrelated consequences on the
system
Principals: users, processes, or
other entities that can perform
actions on the system
Policies: precisely written rules
that govern which principals are
authorized to perform which
actions
Credentials: digitally signed
documents that bind principal
identities to allowable actions,
including the authority to allow
principals to delegate authority to
other principals.
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Access Control Models

Various models have been developed to formalize
mechanisms to protect the confidentiality and
integrity of documents stored in a computer
system.

The Bell-La Padula (BLP) model

The Biba model
The Low-Watermark model
The Clark-Wilson model
The Chinese Wall model (The Brewer and Nash model)
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The Bell-La Padula Model

The Bell-La Padula (BLP) model is a classic
mandatory access-control model for
protecting confidentiality.
The BLP model is derived from the military
multilevel security paradigm, which has been
traditionally used in military organizations for
document classification and personnel
clearance.

The Bell-La Padula Model

The BLP model has a strict, linear ordering on the security of
levels of documents, so that each document has a specific
security level in this ordering and each user is assigned a
strict level of access that allows them to view all documents
with the corresponding level of security or below.

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Total Orders and Partial Orders

A linear ordering for documents can be defined in terms of a
comparison rule, . We say that such a rule defines a total order
on a universe set, U, if it satisfies the following properties:
1. Reflexivity: If x is in U, then x < x.
2. Antisymmetry: If x < y and y < x, then x = y.
3. Transitivity: If x < y and y < z, then x < z.
4. Totality: If x and y are in U, then x < y or y < x.
All of the usual definitions of less than or equal to for
numbers, such as integers and real numbers, are total orders.
If we drop the requirement of totality, we get a partial order.
The classic example of a partial order is the set of courses taught at a
college or university, where we say that, for two courses A and B, A < B, if
A is a prerequisite for B.
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How the BLP Model Works

The security levels in BLP form a partial order, <.
Each object, x, is assigned to a security level, L(x). Similarly, each
user, u, is assigned to a security level, L(u). Access to objects by
users is controlled by the following two rules:
Simple security property. A user u can read an object x only if
L(x) < L(u).
*-property. A user u can write (create, edit, or append to) an object x
only if
L(u) < L(x).

The simple security property is also called the no read up rule, as

it prevents users from viewing objects with security levels higher
than their own.
The *-property is also called the no write down rule. It is meant
to prevent propagation of information to users with a lower
security level.
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Defining Security Levels Using

Categories

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The Biba Model

The Biba model has a similar structure to the BLP model, but
it addresses integrity rather than confidentiality.
Objects and users are assigned integrity levels that form a
partial order, similar to the BLP model.
The integrity levels in the Biba model indicate degrees of
trustworthiness, or accuracy, for objects and users, rather
than levels for determining confidentiality.
For example, a file stored on a machine in a closely monitored
data center would be assigned a higher integrity level than a file
stored on a laptop.
In general, a data-center computer is less likely to be
compromised than a random laptop computer. Likewise, when it
comes to users, a senior employee with years of experience
would have a higher integrity level than an intern.
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The Biba Model Rules

The access-control rules for Biba are the reverse of those for
BLP. That is, Biba does not allow reading from lower levels
and writing to upper levels.
If we let I(u) denote the integrity level of a user u and I(x)
denote the integrity level for an object, x, we have the
following rules in the Biba model:
A user u can read an object x only if
I(u) < I(x).
A user u can write (create, edit or append to) an object x only if
I(x) < I(u).

Thus, the Biba rules express the principle that information

can only flow down, going from higher integrity levels to
lower integrity levels.
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The Low-Watermark Model

The low-watermark model is an extension to the
Biba model that relaxes the no read down
restriction, but is otherwise similar to the Biba
model.
In other words, users with higher integrity levels
can read objects with lower integrity levels.
After such a reading, the user performing the
reading is demoted such that his integrity level
matches that of the read object.
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The Clark-Wilson Model

Rather than dealing with document confidentiality and/or integrity,
the Clark-Wilson (CW) model deals with systems that perform
transactions.
It describes mechanisms for assuring that the integrity of such a
system is preserved across the execution of a transaction. Key
components of the CW model include the following:
Integrity constraints that express relationships among objects that
must be satisfied for the system state to be valid. A classic example of
an integrity constraint is the relationship stating that the final balance
of a bank account after a withdrawal transaction must be equal to the
initial balance minus the amount withdrawn.
Certification methods that verify that transactions meet given
integrity constraints. Once the program for a transaction is certified,
the integrity constraints do not need to be verified at each execution
of the transaction.
Separation of duty rules that prevent a user that executes transaction
from certifying it. In general, each transaction is assigned disjoint sets
of users that can certify and execute it, respectively.
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The Chinese Wall Model

The Brewer and Nash model, commonly referred to as the
Chinese wall model, is designed for use in the commercial
sector to eliminate the possibility of conflicts of interest.
To achieve this, the model groups resources into conflict of
interest classes.
The model enforces the restriction that each user can only
access one resource from each conflict of interest class.
In the financial world, such a model might be used, for instance, to
prevent market analysts from receiving insider information from one
company and using that information to provide advice to that
companys competitor.

Such a policy might be implemented on computer systems to

regulate users access to sensitive or proprietary data.
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Role-Based Access Control

The role-based access control (RBAC) model can be viewed
as an evolution of the notion of group-based permissions in
file systems.
An RBAC system is defined with respect to an organization,
such as company, a set of resources, such as documents,
print services, and network services, and a set of users, such
as employees, suppliers, and customers.

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U.S. Navy image in the public domain.

RBAC Components
A user is an entity that wishes to access resources of the organization to
perform a task. Usually, users are actual human users, but a user can also be a
machine or application.
A role is defined as a collection of users with similar functions and
responsibilities in the organization. Examples of roles in a university may
include student, alum, faculty, dean, staff, and contractor. In general,
a user may have multiple roles.
Roles and their functions are often specified in the written documents of the organization.
The assignment of users to roles follows resolutions by the organization, such as employment
actions (e.g., hiring and resignation) and academic actions (e.g., admission and graduation).

A permission describes an allowed method of access to a resource.

More specifically, a permission consists of an operation performed on an object, such as read
a file or open a network connection. Each role has an associated set of permissions.

A session consists of the activation of a subset of the roles of a user for the
purpose of performing a certain task.
For example, a laptop user may create a session with the administrator role to install a new
program.
Sessions support the principle of least privilege.
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Hierarchical RBAC
In the role-based access control model, roles can be
structured in a hierarchy similar to an organization chart.
More formally, we define a partial order among roles by
saying that a role R1 inherits role R2, which is denoted
R1 > R2,
if R1 includes all permissions of R2 and R2 includes all users
of R1.
When R1 > R2, we also say that role R1 is senior to role R2
and that role R2 is junior to role R1.
For example, in a company, the role manager inherits the role
employee and the role vice president inherits the role
manager.
Also, in a university, the roles undergraduate student and
graduate student inherit the role student.
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Visualizing Role Hierarchy

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