OASIS Mailing List ArchivesView the OASIS mailing list archive below
or browse/search using MarkMail.

 


Help: OASIS Mailing Lists Help | MarkMail Help

xacml message

[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [List Home]


Subject: Re: [xacml] Is the choice element in Policy correct


Hi Rich,

Seems good to me. We can put the advisory note in the planned implementors guide. I thought someone was collecting these on the wiki for the guide. If there is no such wiki, you could easily create a page.

Best regards,
Erik

On 2012-01-30 18:49, rich levinson wrote:
Hi Erik,

The impression I am getting is that the intent of the spec is that
any of these 4 elements can occur any number of times (0->n),
and the fact that meaningless Policies (i.e. Policies w no Rules)
can be created is not a concern, because they can be used as
placeholders for certain implementation strategies.
where the term "meaningless" refers to the fact that
such Policies play no role in the decision process,
and their presence may be ignored by a PDP.
Also, the fact that 2 of them have minOccurs="0" and
the other 2 have default minOccurs="1" is a pointless
distinction, because the fact that any element has
minOccurs="0" implicitly overrides the minOccurs of
any other element within the choice group.

It would seem to me that at a minimum, we could include
an advisory note to developers that a PDP may ignore
a Policy that contains no Rules, since there is no point
from a XACML functional perspective to provide any logic
to do anything specific with such Policies.

Such an approach would remove any questions from developers,
and could leave the schema unchanged.

Thoughts?

    Thanks,
    Rich




On 1/30/2012 5:25 PM, Erik Rissanen wrote:
Hi Rich,

Actually, I think I was mistaken in my email. If the schema is like it is:

<xs:choice maxOccurs="unbounded">
    <xs:element ref="xacml:CombinerParameters" minOccurs="0"/>
    <xs:element ref="xacml:RuleCombinerParameters" minOccurs="0"/>
    <xs:element ref="xacml:VariableDefinition"/>
    <xs:element ref="xacml:Rule"/>
</xs:choice>

Then a completely empty policy is possibly since you can make a choice of a "non-existing parameter". So there really is no issue here. Agreed, the schema could be a bit prettier, but it works.

Best regards,
Erik

On 2012-01-30 10:14, Erik Rissanen wrote:
Hi Rich,

I think the intent has always been to allow empty policies. It's useful especially for automatically generated policies to be able to generate empty policies as a special case of a general scheme for generating a full policy set.

So I would not want to restrict the schema like your first bullet point. Rather the change to do would be to add a minOccurs="0" to the choice, but since it is already possible to generate a policy with no rules in the current schema (by putting a a dummy combiner parameter), I don't think it's a big deal.

Best regards,
Erik

On 2012-01-29 19:15, rich levinson wrote:
Hi Erik,

At this point we are simply trying to determine what the schema should be,
in the sense that if it was reflecting the intended behavior, what changes
would be appropriate.

For example it would seem the appropriate changes might be:
  • A Policy must have one or more Rules.
  • A Policy may have zero or more VariableDefinitions
  • A Policy may have zero or one CombinerParameters
  • A Policy may have zero or one RuleCombinerParameters
If these are the actual requirements that are intended, or if some
other specific requirements are more accurate or appropriate, then
the purpose of the issue being raised is to determine what are the
correct requirements.

Once the requirements are established, then we can evaluate what,
if any, impact that might have on the schema, and whether the
TC thinks the schema should be changed.

At present, it appears that the current schema does not reflect
any kind of plausible real requirements, and this represents
a problem for developers using the specification to build products,
because they may be uncertain how to handle the use cases that
are made possible w the current schema.

    Thanks,
    Rich


On 1/27/2012 6:10 PM, Erik Rissanen wrote:
Hi Rich,

I don't think there is anything which needs to be changed here. It's true that the schema is a bit weird in this respect. It's a carry over from 2.0, and does not represent any practical concern.

Empty policies are fine I think, though it does not really make sense to have an empty policy with variables since there would be no rule to use them.

But there is not really any issue in how to interpret any combination which the schema allows and there is no reason for a product to produce meaningless policies.

I would say that we keep it as it is.

Best regards,
Erik


On 2012-01-24 07:23, rich levinson wrote:
To TC:

We have been looking at the xsd for Policy and there is a central
"choice" element that does not appear correct, although for
mainstream Policies it probably does not show up.

The choice element is the following:
2028
<xs:choice maxOccurs="unbounded">
    <xs:element ref="xacml:CombinerParameters" minOccurs="0"/>
    <xs:element ref="xacml:RuleCombinerParameters" minOccurs="0"/>
    <xs:element ref="xacml:VariableDefinition"/>
    <xs:element ref="xacml:Rule"/>
</xs:choice>
This is the construct that allows multiple Rules in a Policy, which, looking at
the Rule element alone, seems ok, as default is minOccurs="1", and it
inherits maxOccurs="unbounded" from the choice element itself.

However, very little else about this element appears to make sense:
  1. Since this is a choice element, w minOccurs="1", one could choose any
    of the other 3 elements and nothing else, and the result would be a
    Policy with zero Rules. Does this make sense?
  2. With zero Rules, even if you used the Policy to define VariableDefinitions,
    they cannot be referenced outside the Policy, and since there are no
    Rules in the Policy, there is nothing that would ever use the
    VariableDefinitions.
  3. Does it make sense to have multiple instances of either CombinerParameters
    or RuleCombinerParameters? i.e. can't all the parameters be put in one
    element in both cases? If not then why are these elements in the choice
    block that allows unbounded instances?
Please advise as to whether the above interpretation is accurate. If so, we would
like to consider raising this as an issue for action.

    Thanks,
    Rich







[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [List Home]