Printer-friendly versionSend to friendPDF version

Title: A Day in the Life of an Access Controller on the WWWAbstract: We still wish to govern the accesses to resources residing on large, loosely coupled and mostly uncoordinated distributed systems such as the WWW. In order to do so, we wish to crea...te access control frameworks that are sufficiently generic so that they can be used by multiple application domains. In order to do so, one needs to be able to define all relevant entities in a manner that is name-space independent, but yet customizable as needed. In addition, the framework needs to be able to interpret security policies and provide decisions that have to be computed amidst (distributed) divergences and failures. Additionally, enforcing some decisions made by such policy frameworks may change the policies themselves, thereby requiring the transactional and locking mechanisms in order enforce the rendered decisions. Yet, these policy frameworks, being constructed out of a collection of communicating processes, have to evolve from their birth to death in a manner that reflects their operational environment in a policy consistent manner. This talk describes some work that has been conducted in cooperation with a group of individuals on enhancing the eXtensibe Access Control Meta Language (XACML) and its enforcement framework.Bio: Duminda Wijesekera is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia. During various times, his research interests have been in security, multimedia, networks, secure signaling (telecom, railway and SCADA), avionics, missile systems, web and theoretical computer science. He holds courtesy appointments at the Center for Secure Information Systems (CSIS) and the Center for Command, Control and Coordination (C4I) at George Mason University, and the Potomac Institute of Policy Studies in Arlington, VA. Prior to GMU he was at Honeywell Military Avionics, Army High Performance Research Center at the University of Minnesota, and the University of Wisconsin. His doctorates are in Computer Science and Logic from the University of Minnesota and Cornell University in 1997 and 1990, respectively.