James Cabral, David Webber, Farrukh Najmi, July 2012

Managing information privacy and access policies has become a critical need and technical challenge. The desired solution should be ubiquitous, syntax neutral but a simple and lightweight approach that meets the legal policy requirements though the application of clear, consistent and obvious assertions. Today we have low-level tools that developers know how to implement with, and we have legal documents created by lawyers, but then there is a chasm between these two worlds. 2

The RuleML community has long understood this and developed and is developing new and improved methods and solutions. The challenge is in taking these approaches and being able to apply these to NIEM XML based information sources in a high level conceptual way that is accessible to information analysts and general NIEM practitioners, rather than the provence of specialized XML-programmers only. Then we also need these techniques to be broadly applicable, using existing open public software standards and tools so we can enable the widest possible adoption within the NIEM community. 3

The solution we are introducing will:  Provide a clear declarative assertions based method, founded on policy approaches developed by the rules community,  Leveraging open software standards and tools and  Enabling business information analysts to apply and manage the policy profiles Show illustrative design time and run time examples by:  Visually assigning exchange components and rule assertions  Show applying this to retrieval of documents stored with registry and repository services. 4

Electronic Policy Statements 5 Policy Rules Portal User Dashboard 1 1 Apply Policy Rules to Requested Case Content 4 4 Users see only information permitted by their role and policy profile Request Output Templates Information Requests 2 2 Case Management Registry Services Registry Services 3 3 Output Templates Case Documents XML Response Output Templates Requested Information 5 5 User Profiles

 Part 1  Problem introduction and policy methods overview  Part 2  Design time technical walkthrough of rule assertions example  Part 3  Run time deployment with registry services

Policy Methods Overview

 Three levels of information access  Citizen level reporting - SAR statistics  Local law enforcement officials - case review  State and Federal - case management and coordination  This means three profiles:  Profile 1 - Registry query - statistics results  Profile 2 - Local staff  Profile 3 - Regional staff 8 SAR – Suspicious Activity Report

Electronic Policy Statements Coarse- Grained Role-based authorization of subjects. Access granted to coarse-grained data objects. E.g., “Permit law enforcement to access the NCIC Wanted Persons Database.” Fine-Grained Attribute-based authorization of subjects. Access limited to specific data objects based on attributes. E.g., “Permit law enforcement to access criminal history records if the records were created by the requester’s agency.” 9

 Actions. Electronic Policy Statements 10 Properties of the access rules and environment. Conditions. – Subject. – Resource. – Policy. Obligations.

 Express policies in a structured language (e.g., XML)  Identify requesters  Compare data collection and release purposes  Enforce retention rules  Notify data owners and subscribers  Verify compliance Privacy and Security Architectures 11

Privacy and Security Architectures 12 GFIPM User Metadata NIEM GFIPM Content Metadata XACML Actions Electronic Policy Statements

 A mechanism to specify policy rules in unambiguous terms  XML Access Control Markup Language (XACML)  Machine-readable  Supports federated and dynamic policies Privacy and Security Architectures 13

Privacy and Security Architectures 14 TermDescription PAPPolicy Administration Point - Point which manages policies PDPPolicy Decision Point - Point which evaluates and issues authorization decisions PEPPolicy Enforcement Point - Point which intercepts user's access request to a resource and enforces PDP's decision. PIPPolicy Information Point - Point which can provide external information to a PDP, such as LDAP attribute information.

Privacy and Security Architectures 15 PolicySetsPoliciesRules Obligations Functions Targets Attributes

Privacy and Security Architectures 16

Design Time Rule Assertions Concepts

 Traditional NIEM approach focuses on the information exchange data handling  Uses XSD schema to define content structure and metadata  Need is for a bridge between the NIEM schema, the XML information instances and the XACML rule assertion language  Approach is based on visual content structure templates with declarative rule assertions 18

D E P L O Y E D XACML Engine XACML Engine Rule Assertions P O L I C I E S Output Templates Exchange Structures Policy Assertion Template 2 2 S C H E M A NIEM IEPD NIEM IEPD 1 1 XACML Generation Tool 3 3 XACML XML Script 4 4 Rules Asserted to Nodes in the Exchange Structure via simple XPath associations 19

Rules Assertions associate and control access privacy to specific content areas in the SAR details structure Visual metaphor allows policy analysts to verify directly 20

Rule Assertions NIEM data flows XACML Engine XACML Engine Information Exchange 5 5 INTERFACES P O L I C I E S CAM Editor Visual Designer Output Templates Exchange Templates 1 1 Information Exchange 3 3 INTERFACES 4 4 S C H E M A NIEM IEPD NIEM IEPD NIEM XML NIEM XML NIEM XML NIEM XML Generated XACML Rules

CAM TOOLKIT + CAMV ENGINE  Open source solutions – designed to support XML and industry vocabularies and components for information exchanges  Implementing the OASIS Content Assembly Mechanism (CAM) public standard  CAMV validation framework and test suite tools  Development sponsored by Oracle CAM Editor resources site: 22

NEXT STEPS  Enhance CAM Editor UI to provide wizards for policy rule assertion entry  Provide XSLT to generate XACML from CAM template  Enhance reporting tools to show policy details in plain English details  Test with sample JPS NIEM exchange schema 23

Illustrative deployment with XACML services and application

Electronic Policy Statements 25 Policy Rules Portal User Dashboard 1 1 Apply Policy Rules to Requested Case Content (PDP Engine) 4 4 Users see only information permitted by their role and policy profile Request Output Templates Information Requests 2 2 Case Management + PAP Registry Services Registry Services 3 3 Output Templates Case Documents XML Response (PEP) Output Templates Requested Information 5 5 User Profiles XACML XML XACML

Privacy and Security Architectures 26 PAP Defines policies. Monitors compliance. PDP Receives requests from the PEP. Identifies policies that match each request. Evaluates request and environment attributes. Directs the PEP. PEP Discloses or redacts the information or denies the request. Logs the request and action. Notifies of the request and action.

Privacy and Security Architectures 27

Bulk loader will trawl server and folder location for content – e.g. original SAR XML documents Bulk Publish of SAR documents 28

SAR Discovery Query (easily extended / tailored without code changes) allows rapid prototyping and verification of content and operations Results returned digest and content retrieval options 29

Review

 Dramatically simpler policies adoption  Can be rapidly developed with existing tools  Can be visually inspected and verified by policy analysts  Enables use of dynamic contextual policies  Supports international standards work 31

CONTRIBUTORS  James E. Cabral Jr. – IJIS/OASIS and MTGM LLC  David Webber – Oracle Public Sector NIEM team  Farrukh Najmi – OASIS ebXML RegRep, SunXACML project and Wellfleet Software 32

RESOURCES  OASIS CAM and tools project site (sourceforge.net)  OASIS XACML and tools project site  OASIS ebXML RegRep and Implementing Registry