Security policy foundations in Context UNITY

Security certification includes assessing an information system to verify its compliance with diverse, pre-selected security controls. The goal of certification is to identify where controls are implemented correctly and where they are violated, creating potential vulnerability risks. Certification complexity is magnified in software composed of systems of systems where there are limited formal methodologies to express management policies, given a set of security control properties, and verify them against the interaction of the participating components and their individual security policy implementations. In this paper, we extend Context UNITY, a formal, distributed, and context aware coordination language to support policy controls. The new language features enforce security controls and provide a means to declare policy specifics in a manner similar to declaring variable types. We use these features in a specification to show how verifying system compliance with selected security controls, such as those found in the NIST SP800-53 document, can be accomplished.