HiPoLDS: A Hierarchical Security Policy Language for Distributed Systems

Expressing security policies to govern distributed systems is a complex and error-prone task. Policies are hard to understand, often expressed with unfriendly syntax, making it difficult for security administrators and for business analysts to create intelligible specifications. We introduce the Hierarchical Policy Language for Distributed Systems (HiPoLDS), which has been designed to enable the specification of security policies in distributed systems in a concise, readable, and extensible way. HiPoLDS design focuses on decentralized execution environments under the control of multiple stakeholders. It represents policy enforcement through the use of distributed reference monitors, which control the flow of information between services. HiPoLDS allows the definition of both abstract and concrete policies, expressing respectively high-level properties required and concrete implementation details to be ultimately introduced into the service implementation.