PROJECT TITLE :

Semiautomated Verification of Access Control Implementation in Industrial Networked Systems

ABSTRACT:

Access management could be a necessary building block in the protection of any kind of cyber system and, during this sense, industrial networked systems (INSs) build no exception. Sometimes, access control policies are specified at a high implementation-freelance level of abstraction and then mapped onto the important system by leveraging offered policy enforcement mechanisms. Unfortunately, different from general-purpose ICT systems, enforcement mechanisms are generally terribly basic in INS. As a consequence, verifying the correctness of policy implementation becomes a vital task, particularly cumbersome when it needs to be dole out entirely by hand. This paper presents a new methodology, that also serves as the premise of a purposely developed software tool conceived to cope with the dearth of policy enforcement mechanisms in INS and to allow semiautomatic verification of policy implementation. Our approach is predicated on a twofold system model that enables each the abstract specification of access control policies and therefore the detailed description of the target physical system. These two separate views are then combined to automatically confirm whether this system implementation matches the policy specification.