CPOL: High-Performance Policy Evaluation

CPOL: High-Performance Policy Evaluation Kevin Borders Xin Zhao Atul Prakash University of Michigan ACM CCS 2005

Overview • Motivation: Why High-Performance? • Current Solutions • CPOL Design • Evaluation of CPOL vs. Other Solutions • Conclusion and Future Work ACM CCS 2005

Motivation: Why High-Performance? • Applications are emerging that require high-throughput policy evaluation • Example: Enforcing privacy policies for location-aware services • Large number of subscribers • Alice may want to give Bob access to her location only Monday through Friday 9 AM – 5 PM when she is in the computer science building • Example: Text messaging • Control who can send you information depending on the time and your location ACM CCS 2005

Current Policy Evaluation Solutions • KeyNote Trust Management System • Delegation chains are used to grant trust • Not designed with performance in mind – very slow • SQL Database • More scalable than KeyNote, but throughput is still not good enough – approx. 2000 queries/second ACM CCS 2005

CPOL Design Goals • Have expressiveness comparable to KeyNote • Express almost everything KeyNote can and some things that KeyNote cannot • Be able to handle a large volume of requests a single machine • Hundreds of thousands of requests/second ACM CCS 2005

CPOL Policies CPOL Policy Fields Owner:The owner is the entity whose resources are controlled by this rule. Licensee(s): The licensee is the entity or group that will receive privileges. Access token: The access token contains information about the rights assigned by this rule.Condition:CPOL verifies that the condition is true before granting the access token to the licensee(s). Sample Policy Owner: AliceLicensee: BobAccessToken { LocationResolution = RoomLevel IdentityResolution = Name DelegationPrivileges = None}Condition { AfterTime = 9 AM BeforeTime = 5 PM InBuilding = {Library, CS} NotInRoom = {ConferenceRoom 1010 CS}} ACM CCS 2005

CPOL Design Overview • CPOL takes advantage of the trend that the domain of policies for a particular application is usually fairly small • Instead of presenting a highly expressive interface at runtime, restrict the domain of policies at compile-time • Define access token and condition objects • CPOL also exploits caching to improve performance ACM CCS 2005

Defining CPOL for an Application • Access Token • Define data members • Define Boolean AddAccess(newToken) – does this token have sufficient delegation privileges to add a new rule with newToken? • Condition • Define data members • Define Boolean Test(state) – is the condition true given an input state? ACM CCS 2005

Caching • Correct invalidation is done using cache conditions • Cache Condition = Sum(Conditions) • Cache Condition is more compact than condition • Example: Calculate time-to-live and highest resolution of location conditions • Invalidated when Boolean StillGood(oldState, newState) is false ACM CCS 2005

Testing Methodology • CPOL, KeyNote, and a MySQL database were all set up to evaluate privacy policies • Three experiments • Single request processing time (CPOL, KeyNote, MySQL) • Memory consumption (CPOL) • Simulated privacy request workload in a university environment (CPOL, MySQL) ACM CCS 2005

Single Request Processing Time • CPOL and MySQL have O(1) processing time with respect to number of policies • KeyNote takes much longer to evaluate one policy with more policies in the system ACM CCS 2005

Memory Usage • Important because CPOL is in memory system • Memory usage is per user, role, role membership, policy (rule), and cache entry • CPOL can store information for approximately 500,000 users with a 2,000,000 entry cache in 500 MB of memory ACM CCS 2005

Simulated Privacy Workload • Movement data was generated using custom schedule-based generator for different numbers of users • Users’ privacy policies were created using information collected by surveying 30 potential users • Varying update frequency from one to thirty seconds ACM CCS 2005

Future Work • Distribute CPOL over multiple servers to further enhance scalability • Minimize state replication between servers • Deploy CPOL in a real location-aware environment • New computer science building at University of Michigan will use CPOL for privacy policy enforcement • Use CPOL in other application domains such as mobile messaging ACM CCS 2005

Conclusion • Applications are emerging that require high-performance policy evaluation • Current solutions (KeyNote and database server) are not efficient enough to handle a large workload • CPOL takes advantage of caching and compiled object attributes to deliver better performance • With 500 users and 5000 policies, CPOL is five to six orders of magnitude faster than KeyNote and two to three orders of magnitude faster than a MySQL implementation, depending on cache hit rate ACM CCS 2005

Questions? • Please contact me if you wish to obtain source code for CPOL or for the schedule-based movement generator – source code will be available online soon! • E-mail: kborders@umich.edu ACM CCS 2005

CPOL: High-Performance Policy Evaluation