Providing interoperation among different information systems while preserving the security requirements of individual systems

Providing interoperation among different information systems while preserving their individual security requirements led to the development of flexible Access Control Models. The Authorization Specification Language (ASL) is a significant part of the infrastructure that can support and enforce uniform security requirements across platforms. For extensive deployment of these frameworks we need methodologies to translate existing Access Control Models into logic-based languages. In this paper we develop a technique to translate well-established access control specifications to ASL. More specifically, we study and develop methods to automatically translate Access Control Lists and Bell-LaPadula models to ASL. Such a transformation is clearly needed to ensure a unified framework for Access Control management. Manual transformations are inefficient and prone to errors. The main technical contribution of the paper is the development of algorithms to automate the transformation process, while preserving the Access Control requirements of the original systems. The efficiency and simplicity of the translations make them suitable for real applications.