Verification of Robust Properties for Access Control Policies

2026-03-13

AI Summary

This work addresses the limitations of traditional access control policy verification, which relies on static, complete policies and struggles to support iterative development and dynamic evolution. The authors propose a robust attribute-based verification approach that formally characterizes security properties guaranteed under any pending decisions and future policy extensions through the judgment $\Vdash_{P}\varphi$. They innovatively define robust security properties inherently promised by a policy’s structure, prove their preservation under compositional extensions, and reduce the universal quantification problem to a finite, executable second-order logic program. Leveraging a logical system supporting implication, conjunction, disjunction, and negation—combined with a monotonicity theorem—they establish a sound and complete verification mechanism that effectively enables security analysis for dynamically evolving policies.

Technology Category

• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Other Foundations of Reasoning under Uncertainty
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Satisfiability Modulo Theories
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Computational Complexity of Reasoning

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Authentication, authorization, and access control
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs

Abstract

Existing methods for verifying access control policies require the policy to be complete and fully determined before verification can proceed, but in practice policies are developed iteratively, composed from independently maintained components, and extended as organisational structures evolve. We introduce robust property verification: the problem of determining what a policy's structure commits it to regardless of how pending decisions are resolved and regardless of subsequent extension. We define a support judgment $\Vdash_{P}φ$ stating that policy $P$ has robust property $φ$, with connectives for implication, conjunction, disjunction, and negation, prove that it is compositional (verified properties persist under policy extension by a monotonicity theorem), and show that despite quantifying universally over all possible policy extensions the judgment reduces to proof search in a second-order logic programming language. Soundness and completeness of this reduction are established, yielding a finitary and executable verification procedure for robust security properties.

Problem

• access control policies
• robust property verification
• policy extension
• incomplete policies
• security properties

Innovation

• robust property verification
• access control policies
• compositional verification
• second-order logic programming
• monotonicity theorem