Separating management policy from the automated managers which interpret the policy facilitates the dynamic change of behaviour of a distributed management system. This permits it to adapt to evolutionary changes in the system being managed and to new application requirements. Changing the behaviour of automated managers can be achieved by changing the policy without have to reimplement them -- this permits the reuse of the managers in different environments. It is also useful to have a clear specification of the policy applying to human managers in an enterprise. This paper describes the work on policy which has come out of two related ESPRIT funded projects, SysMan and IDSM. Two classes of policy are elaborated -- authorisation policies define what a manager is permitted to do and obligation policy define what a manager must do. Policies are specified as objects which define a relationship between subjects (managers) and targets (managed objects). Domains are used to group the object...

Distributed system management, involves monitoring the activity of a system, making management decisions and performing control actions to modify the behaviour of the system. Most of the research on management has concentrated on management mechanisms related to Network Management or Operating Systems. However, in order to automate the management of very large distributed systems, it is necessary to be able to represent and manipulate management policy within the system. These objectives are typically set out in the form of general policies which require detailed interpretation by the system managers. This paper explores the refinement of general high-level policies into a number of more specific policies to form a policy hierarchy in which each policy in the hierarchy represents, to its maker, his plans to meet his objectives and, to its subject, the objectives which he must plan to meet. Management action policies are introduced, and the distinction between imperatival and authority policies is made. The relationship of hierarchies of imperatival policies to responsibility, and to authority policies, is discussed. An outline approach to the provision of automated support for the analysis of policy hierarchies is provided, by means of a more formal definition of policy hierarchy refinement relationships in Prolog. Keywords: Management policy, policy specifications, authorisation, obligation.

Distributed system management is concerned with the tasks needed to ensure that large distributed systems can function in accordance with the objectives of their users. These objectives are typically set out in the form of policies which are interpreted by the system managers. There are benefits to be gained by providing automated support for human managers, or actually automating routine management tasks. In order to do this, it is desirable to have a model of policies as objects which can be interpreted by the system itself. The model is summarised. It is clear that there is the potential for conflicts between policies. These conflicts may be resolved informally by human managers, but if an automated system is to recognise them and resolve them appropriately it is necessary first of all to analyse the types of conflict which may occur. We analyse the types of overlap which may occur between policies, and show that this analysis corresponds to several familiar types of policy conflict...

At present, most of the state-of-the-art solutions for XML access controls are either (1) document-level access control techniques that are too limited to support fine-grained security enforcement; (2) view-based approaches that are often expensive to create and maintain; or (3) impractical proposals that require substantial security-related support from underlying XML databases. In this paper, we take a different approach that assumes no security support from underlying XML databases and examine three alternative fine-grained XML access control solutions, namely primitive, pre-processing and post-processing approaches. In particular, we advocate a pre-processing method called QFilter that uses Non-deterministic Finite Automata (NFA) to rewrite user's query such that any parts violating access control rules are pruned. We show the construction and execution of a QFilter and demonstrate its superiority to other competing methods.

From the security point of view, one challenge for today's distributed architectures is to support interoperation between applications relying on different possibly inconsistent security policies. This paper proposes a practical approach for dealing with the coexistence of different security policies in distributed architectures. We introduce a model for specifying security policies in terms of security domains and access control rules. Then, we identify the set of operators for combining the specifications of sub-policies and we address the validity of the resulting policy according to the security properties of the sub-policies.

AND CONCRETE POLICIES. SOURCE: [1] ....................................... 1 TABLE 2 -- RESEARCH PROCESS AND METHODS......................................................................................... 1 TABLE 3 -- COMPLETION PLAN (PER SEMESTER)........................................................................................ 1 TABLE 4 -- THESIS STRUCTURE.................................................................................................................. 1 Nigel Sheridan-Smith iii v1.0, 3/11/2003 NOTICE OF DOCTORAL ASSESSMENT SEMINAR Information and Communication Group Faculty of Engineering University of Technology, Sydney Title: A Distributed Policy-based Network Management (PBNM) system for Enriched Experience Networks^TM (EENs) Doctoral Candidate: Nigel Sheridan-Smith Venue: 1/2219 Time: 10:30 am Date: Wednesday 5 November 2003 ABSTRACT Policy-based Network Management (PBNM) systems have traditionally been used in enterprise networks where the emphasis has been on centralising the responsibility for management of the network for simplicity. In this environment, PBNM systems have been helpful in partially automating the configuration of the network and prioritising the use of resources.

Distributed system management is concerned with the tasks needed to ensure that large distributed systems can function in accordance with the objectives of their users. These objectives are typically set out in the form of policies which are interpreted by the system managers. There are benefits to be gained by providing automated support for human managers, or actually automating routine management tasks. In order to do this, it is desirable to have a model of policies as objects which can be interpreted by the system itself. The model is summarised.