Using First-Order Logic to Reason about Policies
<|reference_start|>Using First-Order Logic to Reason about Policies: A policy describes the conditions under which an action is permitted or forbidden. We show that a fragment of (multi-sorted) first-order logic can be used to represent and reason about policies. Because we use first-order logic, policies have a clear syntax and semantics. We show that further restricting the fragment results in a language that is still quite expressive yet is also tractable. More precisely, questions about entailment, such as `May Alice access the file?', can be answered in time that is a low-order polynomial (indeed, almost linear in some cases), as can questions about the consistency of policy sets.<|reference_end|>
@article{halpern2006using,
    title={Using First-Order Logic to Reason about Policies},
    author={Joseph Y. Halpern and Vicky Weissman},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:cs/0601034},
    year={2006},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={cs/0601034},
    primaryClass={cs.LO cs.CR}
}