A Formal Language for XML Authorisations Based on Answer Set Programming and Temporal Interval Logic Constraints

Introduction

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) (WWW Consortium, 2008) has steadily become a common encoding format for software applications. It is a popular and reliable formatting structure for the storage, presentation, and communication of data over the Internet. Many applications use XML to encode important, and in many cases, private information. Because XML does not have an inherent security model as part of its specification there is a necessity for methods in which access to XML documents can be controlled (WWW Consortium, 2008).

In this paper, we present the development of a formal language that will provide access control to XML documents. A^xml(T) is used to define a security policy base capable of specifying all the access rights that subjects in the scope of an XML environment should have or be denied.

The formal language has particular aspects that differ from most other implementations. First, it incorporates the XML query language, XPath, into it for the purpose of defining which documents (or elements within a document) we would like to restrict access to (WWW Consortium, 1999). An XPath is a string representation of traversing through an XML document to return an element within the document. For example, the following is an XPath that follows the tree-like structure of a document to return the element author:

/library/books/book/author

XPath also includes other interesting features. These include, but are not limited to, XPath predicates and wildcards which allow for broader and much more expressive XPath queries (WWW Consortium, 1999). As opposed to static XPath’s which are only meant to return specific nodes within XML documents, we can use these features to write dynamic paths that can represent zero to many elements within the database of documents.

Secondly, the formal language uses the Role-based Access Control model (Ferraiolo et al., 1995) as a basis for the structure of authorisations to subjects. This primarily means rather than applying authorisations directly to subjects, we create roles that can have one or more specified authorisations. This gives us better control over which subjects have what authorisations and is the foremost reason this model is chosen over others (i.e., Discretionary and Mandatory Access Control models; Ferraiolo et al., 1995). Consequently, it also allows us to easily incorporate the principles of separation of duty and conflict resolution directly into the language (Ferraiolo et al., 1995).

Finally, we incorporate temporal interval logic reasoning into the formal language. Temporal intervals are representative of specific sections of quantitative time. Temporal interval logic is the study of relating these various points and sections of time with each other. We use temporal intervals in our formal language for the purpose of specifying when authorisations to XML documents should be applied. We also use temporal logic to reason upon relationships that authorisations could have with each other with respect to time.

Temporal logic is a well studied field and many models or methods have been proposed in the last decades. For our purposes, we choose to use Allen’s Temporal Interval Relationship algebra (Allen, 1984). Allen’s temporal relationships cover all possible ways in which intervals can relate to one another (such as before, meets, equal, etc.) and are incorporated into the syntax of our formal language. However, it should be noted that what makes Allen’s temporal interval logic differ from others, and what makes it appealing for our work, is that it forgoes relating intervals with specific quantities of time. Simply, Allen’s logic relates intervals without the need to specify or know exactly when an interval takes place. This is possible due to the fact that when a temporal interval takes place is implied by its relationship(s) with all other intervals. Therefore, for an interval to exist and be relevant, it only need have at least one of Allen’s relationships with at least one other interval.

The semantics of our formal language is provided through its translation into a logic program. Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a relatively new form of programming in the field of knowledge representation and reasoning. It is a form of declarative programming for search problems involving non-monotonic reasoning and is based on Gelfond’s and Lifschitz’s (1988) stable model semantics of logic programming (Gelfond & Lifschitz, 1988; Baral, 2003; Lifschitz, 2008).