[Colloq] Hiring Talk **Monday, February 17** 149CN

[Rachel Bates]

College of Computer and Information Science Colloquium
presents
William Cook
Allegis Corporation

  who will speak on:
Policy-Based Authorization



Monday, February 17, 2003
10:30am
149 Cullinane Hall
Northeastern University



ABSTRACT
With the advent of the Internet, more and more users are gaining access to
large-scale systems containing sensitive information, including business
plans, medical records, financial data, and project details. The users of
these systems are participating in complex processes that frequently involve
a mixture of collaboration, competition, selective sharing of information,
and complex separation of duties. Existing authorization models do not allow
application developers or security managers to effectively define and manage
access to these kinds of complex and dynamic systems.

This talk presents a policy-based authorization model that supports
fine-grained access control while limiting the overhead required in managing
security. The system is based on a small domain-specific language for
specifying authorization policies that enables concise and understandable
descriptions of authorization behavior.

The system has been implemented as a policy-enforcing reference monitor that
controls access to an underlying relational database. The policies are
combined using a high-level compositional query model and then compiled into
SQL for efficient execution. The authorization system also has well-defined
interfaces with workflow and user interface models, so that authorization
policies can be configured independently of other system functions.

Short Bio

William Cook is Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Allegis
Corporation. He has been chief architect for several award-winning products,
including the eBusiness Suite at Allegis, the Writer's Solution for Prentice
Hall, and the AppleScript language at Apple Computer. At HP Labs his
research focused on the foundations of object-oriented languages. He
completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Brown University in 1989.