Marco Casassa Mont

The POWER project involves research and development of solutions to deal with refinement and deployment of security and business policies within an enterprise environment.

A policy-based management system is really useful if it allows not only a high level description of abstract policy, but also enables such policy to be refined and eventually mapped into an appropriate configuration for controlling devices in the managed system. Such a full integration has only been discussed in the literature but not realised so far. Our approach demonstrates a way towards making it a reality in practice.

Policies are described by using policy templates that can be refined by a policy administrator, by using a policy wizard. The policy wizard, based on a policy engine, is able to suggest possible refinement task to the administrator, based on the interpretation of the policy template and the usage of an Information and System Model (ISM).

A prototype (POWER prototype) was built, based on an access control management scenario. Intellectual Properties have been generated.

Further information and details about this project and area of investigation can be found in the following HPL Technical Report:

• HPL-1999-126 Marco Casassa Mont, Adrian Baldwin, Cheh Goh - POWER Prototype: Towards Integrated Policy-Based Management - HPL-1999-126, 1999