Model Driven Security Policy Automation

On this blog, ObjectSecurity co-founder and CEO Ulrich Lang discusses security policy automation and model-driven security. The aim of this blog is to advocate advance the state of the art in this area through exchange of ideas. www.modeldrivensecurity.org - www.policyautomation.org - www.objectsecurity.com

Monday 27 June 2011

XACML is a machine policy format, not a policy authoring language for humans

We have said it since 2003, and finally we are not alone anymore. Increasingly, industry trade bodies and analysts agree with us that XACML is not a viable policy authoring language for humans. For example, OASIS had a recent webinar where Domain Specific  Languages (DSLs) were mentioned in the "Future directions" part of the presentation. Great, because model-driven security policy automation is inherently based on DSLs, and ObjectSecurity's OpenPMF has full standards-based (Eclipse EMF) support for DSLs. Recently, an analyst who covers the authorization management space wrote that XACML is only good if it is hidden from humans.
Because this is great and shows that the industry is moving towards finally accepting that policy automation as a necessary mechanism to make authorization management work, I would like to explain in a bit more detail that it is not only about "hiding" XACML, but also about automatically generating technical details from generic DSLs. DSLs should express policies in the way human security policy specialists think about policy, which might be different from how the technical enforcement actually makes concrete decisions. ObjectSecurity's award-winning and patent-pending model-driven security policy automation bridges the gap to the actual technical enforcement rules through transformation algorithms that can analyze many information sources (e.g. business processes, application mashups, directory information, sensor information) to automatically generate and update the technical rules.If you want to read up about this, feel free to read our website as an introduction, and get further details here.