Policy Management of Enterprise Systems: A Requirements Study

1. Policy Management of Enterprise Systems: A Requirements Study Pranam Kolari Tim Finin, Yelena Yesha Kelly Lyons, Jen Hawkins, Stephen Perelgut 2006 IEEE Workshop on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks 7 June 2006 http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/paper/html/id/279/

2. State of the Art, Motivation • Policy 2005 • Security, Trust, Privacy, Policy-based Management • Network management, Pervasive Computing, Multi-agent coordination • Policy 2006 • Similar themes this year • Scope of policy management • Panel on Singleton Policies

3. The Problem • Policy Management of an Enterprise Web Application • Identify Policy Decision/Influence Points • Domain specific requirement characteristics • Applicability of existing research/tools • An application case-study • Elicit requirements from users • GOAL: Abstract out policy management requirements for a new class of applications

4. CASSIS • Used by IBM Centers for Advanced Studies (CAS), a university facing department • Artifact, The Project Proposal • Actors and their Roles • CAS Research Staff Members (CRSM) initiate proposal from Professors • Professors/Researchers submit proposal/s • CRSM assigns Reviewers and Evaluators to proposal • CAS Head approves proposal • CRSM and CAS Head monitor project • Workflow - Actors interact with the Artifact

5. Management Requirements • Tuning and adaptability • Address rotational management • Accountability • To Proposal submitters • To higher level management • Comply to organizational and regional statutory requirements • Along two axes • Privacy • Business

6. CASSIS Privacy Policies (1) (i) Java Server Page (JSP) templates common to all roles (ii) Field specific decisions hidden in implementation

7. CASSIS Privacy Policies (2) • Role Based Access Control • E.g. Evaluators have access to all reviews, but not to other evaluations • Adaptability • Policy Management Autonomic Computing (PMAC) toolkit • Autonomic Computing Policy Language (ACPL) • Rules hidden in “java” code were now made explicit • Accountability • To users, translation to P3P vocabulary • To the enterprise, organization specific vocabulary

8. CASSIS Business Policies (1) • Directly influences actions in current state • E.g. CAS RSM – When choosing reviewers, reviewer location and their IBM department are important • Influences future actions incrementally • E.g. CAS Head – Past collaboration with IBM could potentially improve proposal merit

9. Business Policies (2) • Event triggering for policy guidance • Screens used by the role players to work on the artifact • Conditions based on Knowledge Base (KB) • IBM Intranet, e.g. Employee databases available within IBM, access APIs available (SOA vision), trustworthy • Web KB, e.g. publication databases available on the Web, XML data dumps, not trustworthy • (Intranet+Web) KB , not trustworthy • Result of Policies • Act as guidelines (recommendations) to role-players

10. Business Policies (3) • Traditional Business Policies • Actions directly executed by machines • Typically ECA, Event Condition Action • Trustworthy underlying knowledge base (KB) • Application area -- resource management • Policies are actionable • How are CASSIS Policies different? • Actions filtered by humans • Policy results influence actions, guidelines • Underlying KB not necessarily trustworthy • Potentially large KB

11. In the Workflow Context 2 Policy Decision Point 1 Management 4 3 Justification Auditability 4 SPARQL Users WWW Justification/Accountability Knowledge Base

12. Workflow Context - Example • Policy: CAS Head – Past collaboration with IBM could potentially improve proposal merit • SPARQL on KB used by Policy Rule Policy Rule • SPARQL

13. Workflow Context - Example PREFIX ibm <http://ibm.com/> PREFIX citeseer <http://citeseer.pst.edu/> PREFIX cas <http://ibm.com/cas> CONSTRUCT { ?x ibm:email ?email . ?y citeseer:coauthor ?x . ?y cas:author <cas:Proposal-1> } WHERE { ?x ibm:email ?email . ?y citeseer:coauthor ?x . ?y cas:author <cas:Proposal-1> } PREFIX ibm <http://ibm.com/> PREFIX citeseer <http://citeseer.pst.edu/> PREFIX cas <http://ibm.com/cas> ASK { “x@ca.ibm.com” ibm:email ?email . ?y citeseer:coauthor ?x . ?y cas:author <cas:Proposal-1> } ASK – Queries as Conditions CONSTRUCT – Query returns graph patterns, used to display to the user during on a policy recommendation and for later auditing

14. Continuing Work • ECR[J] - Event Condition Recommendation [Justification] • The exact nature of modeling “Recommendation” • Policy Language Overlaying SPARQL • Details of Justification Repository • Elicit explicit policy rules from enterprise management

15. Conclusions • Enterprise Web Applications amenable to privacy policy enablement • Interoperability across policy vocabularies continues to be a bottleneck • Business Policy Enablement raises interesting future challenges • Underlying Knowledge Base • Policies or Guidance? • Auditing/Accountability • Iterative Refinement of Business Policies

16. Questions?