Attacking the Core Problems of Data Access Control
Lafayette
Mon Sep 28 | 8:30am
Abstract
Current data security measures are demonstrably not working in practice. Data breaches continue to occur because real systems are routinely deployed with misconfigurations that allow unauthorized access to data. Such errors are common, easy to make, and often high-impact.
There have been many attempts to solve this with new policy languages and enforcement engines that aim to decouple policy from code and enable uniform enforcement. In principle, centralization should allow consistent security decisions across services. In practice, however, writing even “simple” policies that correctly capture intent remains challenging: small mistakes can scale to organization-wide exposure.
We argue that this difficulty is structural. Modern policy languages (i) are too complex to reason about locally, because they admit highly expressive logical conditions whose global effects are hard to anticipate, and (ii) lack critical features that enable robust, collaborative policy development.
Without simple policy-language semantics and an explicit compositional structure, collaborative policy authoring inevitably introduces misconfigurations. In any organization of meaningful size, no single author controls the entire policy corpus; teams, departments, and data owners must each contribute rules that reflect their domain-specific requirements. Effective policy management demands effective collaboration, but current centralized approaches are nearly incompatible with it. Policies with high expressivity and unconstrained interactions have hard-to-anticipate consequences because every author must reason about every other author’s rules before deploying their own. This obligation scales poorly and is routinely violated.
At its core, the challenge is usability. Usability is often narrowly associated with interface design, but we adopt a broader view: usability is the fundamental property that enables users to operate a system correctly. A security mechanism that is difficult to use will be used incorrectly, and incorrect use is insecurity. In the context of access-control policy, correct operation means that individual authors can faithfully translate their own intent into function, and multiple authors can compose their efforts into a coherent and correct whole.
In this presentation, we will describe our open-source research project that aims to solve this problem. We will show how we decompose policy usability into two complementary dimensions: local and global. Local usability concerns the individual author’s experience: how easy is it to write, read, and understand my own policies? Local usability is addressed primarily through simpler semantics: a language whose constructs have clear, predictable meanings eliminates common single-author errors.
Global usability concerns the collaborative setting: what must I know of other authors’ policies before I can safely deploy mine? In current systems, the answer is effectively all of it because of cascading interactions. Global usability is addressed primarily through separation of concerns: a compositional structure that bounds the effects of each author’s policies to a well-defined scope, so that the private actions of one author cannot break the work of another.
Our focus is data access management, where the stakes of misconfiguration are especially high, and the need for multi-stakeholder collaboration is acute. We propose a policy language that is simultaneously radically simpler in form and designed from the ground up to support collaborative authoring.
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Current data security measures are demonstrably not working in practice. Data breaches continue to occur because real systems are routinely deployed with misconfigurations that allow unauthorized access to data. Such errors are common, easy to make, and often high-impact.
There have been many attempts to solve this with new policy languages and enforcement engines that aim to decouple policy from code and enable uniform enforcement. In principle, centralization should allow consistent security decisions across services. In practice, however, writing even “simple” policies that correctly capture intent remains challenging: small mistakes can scale to organization-wide exposure.
We argue that this difficulty is structural. Modern policy languages (i) are too complex to reason about locally, because they admit highly expressive logical conditions whose global effects are hard to anticipate, and (ii) lack critical features that enable robust, collaborative policy development.
Without simple policy-language semantics and an explicit compositional structure, collaborative policy authoring inevitably introduces misconfigurations. In any organization of meaningful size, no single author controls the entire policy corpus; teams, departments, and data owners must each contribute rules that reflect their domain-specific requirements. Effective policy management demands effective collaboration, but current centralized approaches are nearly incompatible with it. Policies with high expressivity and unconstrained interactions have hard-to-anticipate consequences because every author must reason about every other author’s rules before deploying their own. This obligation scales poorly and is routinely violated.
At its core, the challenge is usability. Usability is often narrowly associated with interface design, but we adopt a broader view: usability is the fundamental property that enables users to operate a system correctly. A security mechanism that is difficult to use will be used incorrectly, and incorrect use is insecurity. In the context of access-control policy, correct operation means that individual authors can faithfully translate their own intent into function, and multiple authors can compose their efforts into a coherent and correct whole.
In this presentation, we will describe our open-source research project that aims to solve this problem. We will show how we decompose policy usability into two complementary dimensions: local and global. Local usability concerns the individual author’s experience: how easy is it to write, read, and understand my own policies? Local usability is addressed primarily through simpler semantics: a language whose constructs have clear, predictable meanings eliminates common single-author errors.
Global usability concerns the collaborative setting: what must I know of other authors’ policies before I can safely deploy mine? In current systems, the answer is effectively all of it because of cascading interactions. Global usability is addressed primarily through separation of concerns: a compositional structure that bounds the effects of each author’s policies to a well-defined scope, so that the private actions of one author cannot break the work of another.
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