Abstract
Policy comparison is useful for a variety of applications, including policy validation and policy-aware service selection. While policy comparison is somewhat natural for policy languages based on description logics, it becomes rather difficult for rule-based policies. When the policy has recursive rules the problem is in general undecidable. Still most policies require some form of recursion to model subject and object hierarchies, and certificate chains. In this paper, we show how policies with recursion can be compared by adapting query optimization techniques developed for the relational algebra. We prove soundness and completeness of our method, discuss the compatibility of the restrictive assumptions we need w.r.t. our reference application scenarios, and report the results of a preliminary set of experiments to prove the practical applicability of our approach. This work will be published in the proceedings of the IEEE POLICY Workshop 2008.

URL:
http://rewerse.net/publications/rewerse-publications.html#REWERSE-DEL-2008-I2-D14

BibTeX:

@deliverable{REWERSE-DEL-2008-I2-D14,
	url = {http://rewerse.net/publications/rewerse-publications.html#REWERSE-DEL-2008-I2-D14}
}