Developing and Enforcing Policies for Access Control, Resource Usage, and Adaptation - A Practical Approach

Proc. of the 10th International Workshop on Web Services and Formal Methods: Formal Aspects of Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing (WS-FM'13), LNCS 8379. Policy-based software architectures are nowadays widely exploited to regulate different aspects of systems’ behavior, such as access control, resource usage, and adaptation. Several languages and technologies have been proposed as, e.g., the standard XACML. However, developing real-world systems using such approaches is still a tricky task, being them complex and error-prone. To overcome such difficulties, we advocate the use of FACPL, a formal policy language inspired to but simpler than XACML. FACPL has an intuitive syntax, a mathematical semantics and easy-to-use software tools supporting policy development and enforcement. We illustrate potentialities and effectiveness of our approach through a case study from the Cloud computing domain.