Nomad: A Security Model with Non Atomic Actions and Deadlines

Abstract

Modelling security policies requires means to specify permissions and prohibitions. However, this is generally not sufficient to express security properties such as availability and obligations must be also considered. By contrast to permissions and prohibitions, obligations are often associated with deadlines to specify bounded time availability requirements. In this case, a violation only occurs if the obliged action is not performed before the deadline. On the other hand, when specifying high level security policies, it is convenient to consider abstract non atomic actions. Since most access control mechanisms only deal with atomic actions such as read or write, these non atomic actions must be decomposed into more basic ones. In this paper, we define a formal security model called Nomad to express privileges on non atomic actions. This model combines deontic and temporal logics. In Nomad, we model conditional privileges and obligations with deadlines. We also formally analyze how privileges on non atomic actions can be decomposed into more basic privileges on elementary actions.