2007/08/15 by Loreto Bravo, Bravo, Loreto, James Cheney +3
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Access Control and Trust #Databases (cs.DB) #Distributed systems and fault tolerance #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Security and Verification in Computing
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0708.2076
openalex publication_date 2007/08/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
XML access control policies involving updates may contain security flaws, here called inconsistencies, in which a forbidden operation may be simulated by performing a sequence of allowed operations. This paper investigates the problem of deciding whether a policy is consistent, and if not, how its inconsistencies can be repaired. We consider policies expressed in terms of annotated DTDs defining which operations are allowed or denied for the XML trees that are instances of the DTD. We show that consistency is decidable in PTIME for such policies and that consistent partial policies can be extended to unique "least-privilege" consistent total policies. We also consider repair problems based on deleting privileges to restore consistency, show that finding minimal repairs is NP-complete, and give heuristics for finding repairs.