Security Policy Reconciliation

The Department of Defense Goal Security Architecture (DGSA) transition plan has established a framework and a long range road map for the implementation of security policies in the DoD information systems. DGSA establishes a number of requirements that should be implemented in order to achieve the goals of the roadmap. One of the requirements is that a representation for security policy rules be developed as well as tools to support policy management. Moreover, it stipulates that interpretation of security policies should be context dependent and the tools should support the security engineers in composing and reusing existing policies. Towards these goals, VIStology proposes to develop a formal, ontology-based representation for security policy rules that is amenable to policy reconciliation and composition. VIStology will analyze requirements for a policy representation language; review various representation languages and propose a language that will support easy policy representation, reuse, composition and reconciliation; propose tools for the support of policy management; develop initial prototypes of tools and policies, assess the usability of the proposed language and tools; develop a plan for the implementation and evaluation of a full-scale prototype of the proposed tools.