Graduation Year
2015
Document Type
Thesis
Degree
M.S.C.S.
Degree Name
MS in Computer Science (M.S.C.S.)
Degree Granting Department
Computer Science and Engineering
Major Professor
Jay Ligatti, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Yao Liu, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Yicheng Tu, Ph.D.
Keywords
Security, access control, parsing, regular expression, policy composition
Abstract
Security policy specification languages are a response to today's complex and vulnerable software climate. These languages allow an individual or organization to restrict and modify the behavior of third-party applications such that they adhere to the rules specified in the policy. As software grows in complexity, so do the security policies that govern them. Existing policy specification languages have not adapted to the growing complexity of the software they govern and as a result do not scale well, often resulting in code that is overly complex or unreadable. Writing small, isolated policies as separate modules and combining them is known as policy composition, and is an area in which existing policy specification languages have a number of drawbacks. Policy composition is unpredictable and nonstandard with existing languages. PoCo is a new policy specification language that uses signed regular expressions to return sets of allowed and denied actions as output from its policies, allowing policies to be combined with standard set operations in an algebraic way. This thesis covers my contribution to the PoCo project in creating a formal grammar for the language, developing a static analysis tool for policy designers, and implementation of the first PoCo language compiler and runtime for the Java platform.
Scholar Commons Citation
Juhlin, Cory Michael, "Developing a Compiler for a Regular Expression Based Policy Specification Language" (2015). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/5885
