Real-Time Policy Enforcement with Metric First-Order Temporal Logic

Abstract

Correctness and regulatory compliance of today’s software systems are crucial for our safety and security. This can be achieved with policy enforcement: the process of monitoring and possibly modifying system behavior to satisfy a given policy. The enforcer’s capabilities determine which policies are enforceable. We study the enforceability of policies specified in metric first-order temporal logic (MFOTL) with enforcers that can cause and suppress different system actions in real time. We consider an expressive safety fragment of MFOTL and show that a policy from that fragment is enforceable if and only if it is equivalent to a policy in a simpler, syntactically defined MFOTL fragment. We then propose an enforcement algorithm for all monitorable policies from the latter fragment, and show that our EnfPoly enforcer outperforms state-of-the-art tools.