Grant: Strategic Projects Supplemental Competition

Information systems are prevalent in today's economy. Nowadays, they are intensively distributed andaccessible over the Internet. To facilitate their construction, deployment, maintenance and improve theiraccessibility, they are now constructed as web services which may be invoked over the Internet from arbitrarylocations. These information systems convey private, valuable information which must be only accessed byauthorized personnel. Several domains like financial systems and patient records are subject to strictregulations like Sarbane-Oxley, HIPAAA, and PIPEDA. Security and privacy are addressed using severaltechnology like authentication, encryption and secure communication protocols. We are targeting anotheraspect of security, which we call functional security. It describes the security rules that are at the businessrequirements level. For instance, the investment account of a customer should only be accessible to its brokerand his manager; the health record of a patient should only be available to its treating doctor or limitedinformation could be made available for a limited time period to consulting specialists. There are variouslevels at which functional security can be specified : data attributes, atomic services (actions) and businessprocess (a complex ordering of atomic services). This project will: i) propose a specification method forfunctional security policies for web systems at these three levels; ii) define synthesis algorithms toautomatically implement functional security policies into a security kernel, within the context of aservice-oriented architecture. Functional security policies will be specified separately from functionalrequirements, in order to facilitate their maintenance and implementation. The security kernel implementingthese policies will be separated from the implementation of the functional requirements, enabling onlinemodification of security rules without having to modify the implementation of the services. Our approach isbased on formal methods, enabling the use of formal verification techniques to ensure the consistency andadequacy of security policies.