A Logic of Trust for Reasoning about Delegation and Revocation

Abstract

In ownership-based access control frameworks with the possibility of delegating permissions and administrative rights, chains of delegated accesses will form. There are different ways to treat these delegation chains when revoking rights, which give rise to different revocation schemes. Hagström et al. [8] proposed a framework for classifying revocation schemes, in which the different revocation schemes are defined graph-theoretically; they motivate the revocation schemes in this framework by presenting various scenarios in which the agents have different reasons for revocating. This paper is based on the observation that there are some problems with Hagström et al.'s definitions of the revocation schemes, which have led us to propose a refined framework with new graph-theoretic definitions of the revocation schemes. In order to formally study the merits and demerits of various definitions of revocation schemes, we propose to apply the axiomatic method originating in social choice theory to revocation schemes. For formulating an axiom, i.e. a desirable property of revocation frameworks, we propose a logic, Trust Delegation Logic TDL) , with which one can formalize the different reasons an agent may have for performing a revocation. We show that our refined graph-theoretic definitions of the revocation schemes, unlike Hagström et al.'s original definitions, satisfy the desirable property that can be formulated using TDL.