Similarity Analysis on Heterogeneous Security Policy

To support efficient cooperation among different organizations in pervasive computing environment, it is an important issue to compare the similarity among different security policies so as to authorize appropriate rights to each other. Although there is much work on security policy similarity comparison, most of them are based on the same concept structure, which is not suitable for pervasive environment where security policies are always based on heterogeneous concept structures. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to compute the similarity between security policies, which is in two processes. Firstly, analysis and integration is on different concept structures by semantic merging. Then each rule of the security policies is mapped to the integrated structure and the similarity between them is calculated. We propose the relevant algorithms and calculation methods. The experiments are made on both efficiency and effectiveness and results show that our approach is well solving the similarity analysis of heterogeneous security policy.