Integrated Specification and Verification of Security Protocols and Policies

Abstract

We propose a language for formal specification of serviceoriented architectures. The language supports the integrated specification of communication level events, policy level decisions, and the interaction between the two. We show that the reachability problem is decidable for a fragment of service-oriented architectures. The decidable fragment is well suited for specifying, and reasoning about, securitysensitive architectures. In the decidable fragment, the attacker controls the communication media. The policies of services are centered around the trust application and trust delegation rules, and can also express rbac systems with role hierarchy. The fragment is of immediate practical relevance: we have specified and verified a number of security-sensitive architectures stemming from the e-government domain.