Reasoning about secure interoperation using soft constraints

The security of a network configuration is based not just on the security of its individual components and their direct interconnections, but also on the potential for systems to interoperate indirectly across network routes. Such interoperation has been shown to provide the potential for circuitous paths across a network that violate security. In this paper we propose a constraint-based framework for representing access control configurations of systems. The secure reconfiguration of a system is depicted as a constraint satisfaction problem.