Enterprise Privacy Authorization Language

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Enterprise Privacy Authorization Language (EPAL) is a formal language for writing enterprise privacy policies to govern data handling practices in IT systems according to fine-grained positive and negative authorization rights. It was submitted by IBM to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 2003 to be considered for recommendation. In 2004, a lawsuit was filed by Zero-Knowledge Systems claiming that IBM breached a copyright agreement from when they worked together in 2001 - 2002 to create Privacy Rights Markup Language (PRML). EPAL is based on PRML, which means Zero-Knowledge argued they should be a co-owner of the standard. [1]

Formal language set of strings of symbols that may be constrained by rules that are specific to it

In mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language consists of words whose letters are taken from an alphabet and are well-formed according to a specific set of rules.

IBM American multinational technology and consulting corporation

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. The company began in 1911, founded in Endicott, New York, as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) and was renamed "International Business Machines" in 1924.

World Wide Web Consortium web standards organization

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web.

See also

XACML stands for "eXtensible Access Control Markup Language". The standard defines a declarative fine-grained, attribute-based access control policy language, an architecture, and a processing model describing how to evaluate access requests according to the rules defined in policies.

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PERMIS is a sophisticated policy-based authorisation system that implements an enhanced version of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standard Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model. PERMIS supports the distributed assignment of both roles and attributes to users by multiple distributed attribute authorities, unlike the NIST model which assumes the centralised assignment of roles to users. PERMIS provides a cryptographically secure privilege management infrastructure (PMI) using public key encryption technologies and X.509 Attribute certificates to maintain users' attributes. PERMIS does not provide any authentication mechanism, but leaves it up to the application to determine what to use. PERMIS's strength comes from its ability to be integrated into virtually any application and any authentication scheme like Shibboleth (Internet2), Kerberos, username/passwords, Grid proxy certificates and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).

Attribute-based access control (ABAC), also known as Policy-based access control, defines an access control paradigm whereby access rights are granted to users through the use of policies which combine attributes together. The policies can use any type of attributes. This model supports Boolean logic, in which rules contain "IF, THEN" statements about who is making the request, the resource, and the action. For example: IF the requestor is a manager, THEN allow read/write access to sensitive data.

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Zero-Knowledge Systems was a Canadian privacy technology software and services company, best known for the Freedom Network, its privacy network. It was founded by brothers Austin Hill & Hamnett Hill and their father Hamnett Hill Sr. in 1997. Its headquarters were in Montreal, Quebec. Early investors and board members were Mike Santer and Alex Hern co-founder Inktomi. The company still exists under the new name Radial Point though is no longer a developer of privacy-enhancing technologies.

ALFA, the Abbreviated Language For Authorization, is a pseudocode language used in the formulation of access-control policies.

References

  1. Paul F. Roberts (June 10, 2004). "Lawsuit questions IBM's ownership of EPAL standard". networkworld.com. Retrieved February 12, 2018.