Preservation of Policy Adherence under Refinement

Policy-basedmanagement is an approach to the management of systems
with respect to issues such as security, access control and trust
by the enforcement of policy rules. This paper addresses the problem
of integrating the requirements imposed by a policy with the system
development process. In order to take a policy specification into account
in the development of a system specification, the notion of policy
adherence is formalized as a relation between policy specifications and
system specifications. Adherence of a system specification to a policy
specification means that the former satisfies the latter. The integrated
development process is supported by refinement, where both the policy
specification and the system specification may be developed under any
number of refinement steps. This paper characterizes the conditions
under which adherence is preserved under refinement and identifies development
rules that guarantee adherence preservation. By results of
transitivity and compositionality the integrated development process
and the analysis tasks can be conducted in a stepwise and modular
way, thereby facilitating development