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Subject: Re: [xacml] Combining algorithm combining orders
Rich, All,
It's a very interesting discussion you have here with some good
thoughts, but there are some things that I don't agree with.
It's a long thread, so it's a bit hard to make responses, so I will just
write up my comments here, in the hope that everybody can figure out
what I mean. :-)
1. You say that we don't need all of the levels PolicySet, Policy and
Rule. I kind of agree. I have thought the same thing before. I don't see
the need to differentiate between PolicySet and Policy. A Rule on the
other hand is something entirely different, and should be distinct.
(When you say that a Rule and Policy need not be separated, you are at
the same time modifying the Policy to contain an Effect, essentially
making it what a Rule is today.)
However, I don't think this is important enough to motivate a change
which complicates compatibility between 2.0 and 3.0.
2. In your first email you suggest that the rule combining algorithm
should be changed (around the test for a "potential deny"). I don't
agree. It's the policy combining algorithm which is wrong, the rule
combining algorithm is right and by changing it you would introduce the
same kind of error in the rule combining algorithm as well.
3. You say that policies should be constrained by an Effect. I don't
agree with this. Policies/PolicySets are not the leaf nodes in the
policy tree, where the effect should be. Policy/PolicySet is for
combining results from lower levels. This is completely right.
Instead, what you are kind of approaching here is something similar to
what Olav Bandmann did at SICS when we did some formal analysis/modeling
of XACML.
He suggested to me that the concept of Indeterminate could be extended
to include a set of "potential results". Currently an Inderminate means
"There was an error, and it could have been a Deny, Permit or NA".
Instead, we could extend Indeterminate so it also includes a more fine
grained set of potential results. For instance, if a rule with
Effect=Permit is evaluated to Indeterminate, we know that it could never
have been a Deny, so we could say that the result is Indet{P/NA},
meaning that "there was an error, and it could have been eitther a
Permit or a NA". There are two other possible versions of Indeterminate
in this model: Indet{D/NA} and Indet{P/D/NA}. Under the old rules, every
Indeterminate is equivalent to an Indet{P/D/NA}. (It's this model Olav
used to analyze the current algorithms, and that was when he found the
errors we are currently debating.)
Now, if a deny overrides combining algorithm would have to combine a
Permit and a Indet{P/NA}, it could see that the indeterminate could
never be Deny, so it can safely return a Permit, despite the error.
I think Rich you were looking for something similar. But it's the
Indeterminate result which needs to be extended with the effect, not the
Policy.
Under this extended model, the extended set of the Indeterminate could
be something entirely internal to the PDP, just for the combining
algorithms to use, or it could also be exposed to the outside the response.
Anyway, Olav made the suggestion a couple of years ago, but I never
posted it to the list since we both thought it would be too
controversial to be accepted by the TC.
It is interesting to note that the rule combining algorithms already
work like this. That's what the "potential-deny/permit" tests do in
effect. If this analysis would have been followed also on the policy
combining algorithms, they would not have been made the way they are today.
I guess that the reason the policy combining algorithms are wrong is the
use case you are talking about Rich: sometimes policy authors want to
specify in their policy that indeterminates should not be propagated
upwards. To handle this, the end result in the design became the current
algorithms. (I am just speculating here, I wasn't a member of the TC
back then, so I don't know.)
Sure, I agree that sometimes it is useful to not propagate errors, but
in many (most?) cases it is not. We need to separate these two use cases
into two different algorithms.
So I propose that:
A. For 2.0 we change nothing. This is is too big to be errata.
B. For 3.0 we change the behavior of the currently defined
permit/deny-overrides algorithms so that they always propagate
Indeterminates upwards. (We do not change the identifiers.)
C. For 3.0 we introduce new combining algorithms
"permit-overrides-indeterminate" and "deny-overrides-indeterminate",
which never propagate an Indeterminate upwards, rather they will default
to Permit/Deny in case of an error.
(I think the concept of extended Indeterminate is a bit complex, and I
am not sure if it's really worth so much, so I do not propose that we
introduce it.)
Best regards,
Erik
Rich.Levinson wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
>
> I do not understand your objection. My suggestion removes nothing from
> the existing logic in terms distinguishing between effect and
> decision. In fact, it adds the ability to determine effect at the
> policy level as well, which the current algorithms do not include
> which results in the ambiguous and contrary results as described by
> Erik in his original email:
> http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/xacml/200701/msg00020.html
> where a Rule with Effect="Permit" results in a parent Policy with
> decision = "Deny".
>
> If you follow the logic I described in detail, especially in the 3rd
> email (although it also exists in the first two as well):
> http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/xacml/200810/msg00044.html
> I think you will find it to be the case that current effect logic is
> preserved, as well as all distinctions between errors and results.
>
> The main point is to define what "Effect" really means, which is that
> the contained logic can produce one and only one of the decision
> types: i.e. either Permit or Deny, but not both (obviously not "both"
> at the same time, but "both" in the sense that until evaluation it is
> not determisitic which can be produced, which becomes the case when
> multiple Rules are present within a Policy that have different
> "Effects".). Once characterized in this manner, it is straight-forward
> to carry it up along with rest of the combining information.
>
> Thanks,
> Rich
>
>
>
> Daniel Engovatov wrote:
>> I disagree with this assessment. I think it was important to separate the ability to explicitly handle errors from results. So effect and decision are distinct on purpose.
>>
>> What we really need is a normative and portable way to define and exchange combining policies.
>>
>> Daniel.
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: "Rich.Levinson" <rich.levinson@oracle.com>
>>
>> Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2008 04:25:31
>> To: Erik Rissanen<erik@axiomatics.com>
>> Cc: XACML TC<xacml@lists.oasis-open.org>
>> Subject: Re: [xacml] Combining algorithm combining orders
>>
>>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> While there are probably some details in the previous email that need to
>> be cleaned up, I think that it identifies a basic problem that needs to
>> be addressed.
>>
>> As indicated, Erik came up with a single rule policy where the rule had
>> an effect of permit, and yet the policy that wrapped it effectively
>> produced a deny at a higher level.
>>
>> I believe the root cause of this problem is that the concept of
>> "Effect", and its implementation in the current XACML specs is
>> fundamentally flawed and needs to be addressed.
>>
>> Again, with Erik's use case, the flaw is obvious: a Rule with an Effect
>> of Permit results in a Policy that causes a Deny. The flaw is that the
>> concept of Effect is not handled properly. "Effect" effectively means
>> that the block of logic contained within this element can ONLY produce
>> either a Deny or a Permit, but not both. On the other hand, because a
>> Policy does not have an Effect, it implicitly can produce either a Deny
>> or a Permit. Therefore, to preserve the notion of "Effect", we have to
>> include it also at the Policy level, with the following constraints: The
>> Effect of a Policy must equal the "AND" of the Effects of all of its
>> Rules. Therefore if a Policy has only Rules that are Permits, then the
>> Effect of the Policy is Permit. If the Policy has Rules with both a
>> Permit and Deny, then the Policy effectively has no "Effect" because the
>> meaning of "Effect" is that only one type of decision is possible, and
>> now the Policy can produce two types of decisions.
>>
>> Therefore, I think my basic conclusions in prev email are correct about
>> converging Policy and Rule into a single element - i.e. the only thing
>> that distinguishes the Rule and single Rule Policy is the fact that the
>> Rule has an Effect and the Policy doesn't, which has been shown above to
>> be wrong and correctable by giving the Policy an Effect attribute, which
>> effectively removes the distinction between Policy and Rule.
>>
>> Comments and suggestions will be much appreciated.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Rich
>>
>>
>> Rich.Levinson wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Erik and TC,
>>>
>>> As indicated at today's meeting, I have concerns about the proposed
>>> changes. I have read this email from Erik fairly carefully, as well as
>>> the first part of the cited reference:
>>> http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/xacml/200701/msg00020.html
>>> and I also started to follow the thread initiated by Daniel:
>>> http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/xacml/200810/msg00027.html
>>>
>>> In the first cited reference, Erik states:
>>> "P1 has a singe rule with a Permit effect."
>>> then goes on about how this Rule gets propagated up and effectively
>>> turns into a Deny under the deny-overrides algorithm.
>>>
>>> I agree that this appears incorrect, and went to look for the source
>>> of that problem.What I found was that it appears this problem results
>>> from what appears to me to be an error in the deny-overrides *rule
>>> *combining algorithm, which has what I believe is an incorrect piece
>>> of logic on lines 5181-5184 of the XACML 2.0 core spec, p 133:
>>>
>>> 5181 if (potentialDeny)
>>> 5182 {
>>> 5183 return Indeterminate;
>>> 5184 }
>>>
>>> It is my opinion the line 5183 should say "return Deny", because it is
>>> at this point that the "potentialDeny" condition that the algorithm
>>> goes to the trouble to find, now throws away, which ends up creating
>>> the situation where a rule with effect = Permit can produce a Deny at
>>> the policy combining level.
>>>
>>> I also read Daniel's comment up to the point where he said:
>>> "Just throwing an exception all the way to the client is what we
>>> have tried to avoid.",
>>> with which I agree. I expect that many policy administrators will want
>>> definitive results to come out of the PDP, and not any "Indeterminates".
>>>
>>> So, my first suggestion would be to fix what I consider to be an error
>>> on line 5183 described above. The practical reason why I consider this
>>> an error is that if there is insufficient information to evaluate a
>>> rule that has an effect = Deny, then, I believe it is legitimate to
>>> define a rule combining algorithm that says that rule should return
>>> the effect = Deny so that one cannot remove input attributes in the
>>> hopes of reversing a decision. One could also define a companion
>>> combining algorithm the evaluated to Indeterminate in order to provide
>>> that option for those who want it. This way a policy administrator
>>> could choose on a case by case basis which behavior is preferable
>>> based on specific situations.
>>>
>>> My second suggestion is more broad-based, and, in fact, I think we
>>> should consider for 3.0 if there is some agreement. I am not expecting
>>> what follows to be bought hook line and sinker at first glance, but I
>>> do think it is worth consideration, especially since we are already
>>> making a major paradigm shift with the category-based attributes that
>>> are defined in 3.0, that effectively adds a new "dimension" to the
>>> domain of attributes, which I believe is a desirable step forward from
>>> the Subject,Resource,Action,Environment-based attributes of 2.0, which
>>> based on previous discussions about the what appear to me as ambiguous
>>> and unnecessary semantic restrictions on the Action attribute
>>> "category". Personally, I would recommend in section B.6 of 3.0 that
>>> the action attributes be defined within a given "resource" category,
>>> as I believe that actions are attributes of resources and do not have
>>> any meaningful definition outside of a resource context. However, that
>>> is just a minor aspect of the overall suggestion I have related to the
>>> combining algorithms.
>>>
>>> The main suggestion about combining-algorithms is that I believe, but
>>> have not definitively proven yet, that there is an unnecessary layer
>>> of combining with two types of rule and policy combining that exists
>>> in 2.0. One easy way to see that this might be true is to do the
>>> following thought experiment:
>>>
>>> 1. Wrap every "Rule" within a Policy element, which effectively turns
>>> every policy into a single rule policy. However, if we do this,
>>> then we lose the "Effect" behavior of the Rule, therefore
>>> 2. Move the Effect attribute up to the Policy level. Therefore, each
>>> single Rule Policy now also preserves the Effect.
>>> 3. Clearly all multi-rule Policies must now become PolicySets, and
>>> the policy-combining algorithm must be replaced by the logic of
>>> the rule combining algorithm to take into account the Effect of
>>> the Policies.
>>> 4. We are now left with a collection of single rule Policies (with an
>>> effect) and PolicySets that have no effect since it was factored
>>> out in step 3. This is where it gets "fuzzy", but I suspect that
>>> we might be able to show that we can still use the rule combining
>>> algorithms on a mix of entities some of which have an effect and
>>> some which don't. I suspect that for example on lines 5174-5177
>>> that we can just skip this block if the entity being tested is a
>>> PolicySet, and execute it if the entity is a Policy. If so, then I
>>> think we are done and have factored the distinction between
>>> rule-combining and policy-combining out of the structure.
>>>
>>> If the above logic is correct, and we can reduce the structure to be
>>> simply Policies with an effect and PolicySets with no effect, and
>>> allow the combining algorithms to only use the "effect" segments on
>>> the objects that contain an effect, then I think we reduce the
>>> complexity of the syntax (either no longer have "Rule"s or no longer
>>> have "Policy"s) at the cost of only what appears to me to be a tiny
>>> increase in the complexity of the rule-combining syntax (which is to
>>> effectively allow for rules that have no effect and simply bypass the
>>> effect logic).
>>>
>>> Bottom line is that I am offering this as a potential suggestion.
>>> Because the logic to analyze it is fairly complex, I allow for the
>>> fact that maybe I have missed something essential. However, since we
>>> are making some fairly broad changes in 3.0, I am offering this as a
>>> potential "simplification". At the very least, I am looking to find
>>> what I might be missing that would prevent this "simplification".
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Rich
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Erik Rissanen wrote:
>>>
>>>> All,
>>>>
>>>> In my opinion the both the deny overrides and permit overrides policy
>>>> combining algorithms are wrong. They treat errors in an incorrect and
>>>> unsecure manner. The corresponding rule combining algorithms are
>>>> correct, and the policy combining algorithms should work in a similar
>>>> manner.
>>>>
>>>> The Indeterminate result in XACML is used in those places where the
>>>> result of some part of the policy cannot be determined because of
>>>> some form of error. It is important that if such an indeterminate
>>>> result affects the final decision of the PDP, that the indeterminate
>>>> is returned to the PEP so that the PEP knows that there is an error.
>>>> If so is not done, errors in policies might not be noticed or an
>>>> attacker might be able to force the PEP into some bad action by
>>>> causing errors in the PDP (for instance by interrupting attribute
>>>> provisioning services).
>>>>
>>>> If we want to determine whether an Indeterminate should affect a
>>>> result, we can consider the indeterminate to be a result which
>>>> potentially could be either Permit, Deny or NotApplicable and for
>>>> each of them see what the overall result would be. If the overall
>>>> result depends on which choice we make for the Indeterminate, then
>>>> the Indeterminate should be propagated "further up" in the policy
>>>> evaluation. (If you don't understand what I mean, just read on, I
>>>> will provide examples.)
>>>>
>>>> Currently the permit overrides policy combining algorithm works like
>>>> this (using the updated textual description):
>>>>
>>>> 1. If any policy evaluates to "Permit", the result is "Permit".
>>>> 2. Otherwise, if any policy evaluates to "Deny", the result is
>>>> "Deny".
>>>> 3. Otherwise, if any policy evaluates to "Indeterminate", the
>>>> result is "Indeterminate".
>>>> 4. Otherwise, the result is "NotApplicable".
>>>>
>>>> Notice how a deny goes before indeterminate. That is a bad priority.
>>>> Consider a policy set with two policies A and B. Assume that A is
>>>> deny and B is indeterminate. Consider what the overall result could
>>>> be if policy B would not have an error in it:
>>>>
>>>> A: Deny
>>>> B: could be Deny
>>>> -> overall would be Deny
>>>>
>>>> A: Deny
>>>> B: could be NotApplicable
>>>> -> overall would be Deny
>>>>
>>>> A: Deny
>>>> B: could be Permit
>>>> -> overall would be Permit
>>>>
>>>> Notice how the result depends on what the indeterminate could
>>>> potentially be. However the current definition gives a definite Deny
>>>> in all cases. This breaks the error propagation safety of the
>>>> combining algorithm. In some applications availability could be
>>>> critical, and a PEP might have a bias that indeterminate means that
>>>> access is allowed. In such a case harm could be caused by this behavior.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Now consider the deny overrides instead. Currently the deny overrides
>>>> policy combining algorithm works like this (using the updated textual
>>>> description):
>>>>
>>>> 1. If any policy evaluates to "Deny", the result is "Deny".
>>>> 2. Otherwise, if any policy evaluates to "Indeterminate", the
>>>> result is "Deny".
>>>> 3. Otherwise, if any policy evaluates to "Permit", the result is
>>>> "Permit".
>>>> 4. Otherwise, the result is "NotApplicable".
>>>>
>>>> Note how an indeterminate is converted to a Deny. This gives the
>>>> following behavior.
>>>>
>>>> A: Permit
>>>> B: could be Deny
>>>> -> overall would be Deny
>>>>
>>>> A: Permit
>>>> B: could be NotApplicable
>>>> -> overall would be Permit
>>>>
>>>> A: Permit
>>>> B: could be Permit
>>>> -> overall would be Permit
>>>>
>>>> Again, there is a definite result from the combining algorithm
>>>> although the underlaying logic is ambiguous.
>>>>
>>>> As I said we have discussed this previously. The threads are here:
>>>>
>>>> http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/xacml/200701/msg00020.html
>>>> http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/xacml/200702/msg00019.html
>>>>
>>>> I propose that we define new identifiers for new combining algorithms
>>>> for 3.0 which work like this:
>>>>
>>>> Deny overrides:
>>>> 1. If any policy evaluates to "Deny", the result is "Deny".
>>>> 2. Otherwise, if any policy evaluates to "Indeterminate", the
>>>> result is "Indeterminate".
>>>> 3. Otherwise, if any policy evaluates to "Permit", the result is
>>>> "Permit".
>>>> 4. Otherwise, the result is "NotApplicable".
>>>>
>>>> Permit overrides:
>>>> 1. If any policy evaluates to "Permit", the result is "Permit".
>>>> 2. Otherwise, if any policy evaluates to "Indeterminate", the
>>>> result is "Indeterminate".
>>>> 3. Otherwise, if any policy evaluates to "Deny", the result is
>>>> "Deny".
>>>> 4. Otherwise, the result is "NotApplicable".
>>>>
>>>> Best regards,
>>>> Erik
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>>
>>
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