Proving Correctness within an Access Control Evaluation Framework

This thesis presents the proofs developed to demonstrate correctness of a case study within the Access Control Evaluation Framework (ACEF). ACEF is a theoretical framework developed at the University of Illinois at Chicago, aimed at creating application-sensitive implementations of access control policies, using well-known access control systems, while preserving some desirable properties. As the formal proof of these properties, including correctness, is usually a tedious process prone to error, a mixed approach was used, which relies on both human high-level abstraction and insight for the outlining of the proof sketches, and then verifies their formal correctness using a formal prover system. To achieve this, a generic template for ACEF for the Prototype Verification System formal prover was developed. The process of generating the proofs for this specific case study was also a benchmark for the validity of the template, as a first step towards the realization of a more automated approach to ACEF. In the conclusions, the validity of the approach is analyzed and possible future steps to improve it are outlined.