Towards semantic web-based management of security services

Policy-based management of distributed system has become a commonly accepted approach for such systems. However, there are a number of open technical issues that might put large-scale deployment of policy-based management techniques at risk. They include automated policy translation (i.e., refinement from abstract business goals to final configurations); development of integrated policy architectures for network, service and application management, and dynamic service creation; and methods for policy conflict detection and resolution. Regarding this last issue, there exist some relevant efforts in the security area, but they are still in the design phase and it is not clear how flexible and powerful they will become when they deal with different kinds of security-related policies and scenarios. This article provides the main ideas behind the semantically enriched specification of security policies and describes an automated process for doing conflict detection on these policies.