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Subject: An idea regarding decision explanation


All,

I have noticed that in many cases users do not seem to be happy with 
just a policy decision. They also want an explanation for the decision 
so they know what to do in case of denied access. This is perhaps also 
related to some of the issues you have talked about recently, Rich, I'm 
thinking about the missing attributes discussion.

In general this is of course impossible to do in practice since in 
principle there is not much else you can do except to say "Here's the 
policy, and here's the request, you figure out what you are missing in 
order to get access."

But I've been thinking about this. I think this could perhaps be solved 
in many practical cases. We can note that in general the user is 
probably not interested in the whole policy, but rather a small part 
which refers to attributes he could do something about. And in many 
cases policy administrators would know which parts of the policies are 
relevant for users. Consider the following example:

- The full policy of an organization contains all kinds of policies with 
all kinds of targets, rules and conditions. One of the policies states 
that an employee with certain qualifications may buy flight tickets, but 
only if he has approval from the travel officer.

- Assume that Alice tries to buy a flight ticket, and that she is 
otherwise qualified, but she does not have approval yet.

In this case Alice is not interested in any way to know that she does 
not meet the conditions in the other policies, but it would help her a 
lot if we could tell her that she need approval since she can affect this.

One way to solve this would be to make it possible to annotate policies 
in some way. The policy writers would know in this case that the 
approval attribute is something Alice can affect and it would be helpful 
for her to know that she needs to get approval and get back. The policy 
writers could mark the approval checking part of the policy as something 
that should be told to Alice if everything up to that part matches.

I haven't worked out any details, but here is a quick idea:

Any conditional expression or target section can contain an annotation 
element like this (not sure about the element name):

<TellUser AppliesTo="Deny,NotApplible">
You need to get approval from the travel officer.
</TellUser>

Of course the actual message could be more machine friendly, for 
instance containing a message code for localization, or an identifier of 
some kind instead of a message.

The semantics is that if policy evaluation has reached this part of the 
policy, and the final decision is one of the indicated ones, the message 
(and perhaps a reference to the policy itself?) shall be provided to the 
PEP. This is a bit similar to an obligation, except that it can apply to 
NotApplicable as well, and it can occur in more than just 
policies/policy sets. (Could we implement this by allowing obligations 
in more places than currently?)

This way policy writers can select those attributes/expressions which 
are relevant to users. And since the parts which are marked are given to 
the PEP only if the annotation was reached, the end result is likely to 
be meaningful, and not a full policy with all kinds of irrelevant stuff.

Of course it won't solve the problem in general, but it could be quite 
useful in many cases and would be pretty simple to implement.

What do you think?

Regards,
Erik



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