Modular Modeling of Delegation Security in Software Development (MoDelSec)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jan Jürjens
• Subject Area: Software Engineering and Programming Languages
• Term: from 2010 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 183482459

The objective of this project is to develop an approach for considering advanced techniques in access control (in particular delegation of user permissions) in the context of a formally-based software development methodology. The approach will be based on formalizations from the Secure Information Flow approach to security verification, which offer the possibility for a particularly finegrained security analysis. Since secure information flow formalizations have traditionally been used in the context of mandatory access control (MAC) which does not usually include user-level permission delegation, investigation of delegation in this context has so far been limited. Since the Secure Information Flow approach has found increasing use over the last few years, one of the goals of this project is therefore to fill this gap by investigating how to support the analysis of sophisticated access control techniques such as delegation of user permissions. A further objective is to exploit results on modular analysis of Secure Information Flow properties (such as [Jür00, Man02]) in the context of the analysis of access control mechanisms and in particular the delegation of user permissions. The scientific progress to be made will be transferred into the context of a secure software development approach based on formal verification tool support. They will be validated using an application from the e-health sector (in collaboration with existing projects in this domain at Fraunhofer ISST, where the Principal Investigator of this project holds a secondary position).Main results of the project will include the following:• A theory supporting the modular analysis of user permission delegation in the context of secure information flow models.• Integration into the context of a secure software development approach based on formal verification tool support.• Automated tools for formal verification based on SMT solvers (such as Z3 [dMB08]).• Validation through an application in an e-health system including access control with delegation.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 1496: Reliably Secure Software Systems