Professor David Chadwick, from the University of Kent Computer Science department, has recently been awarded a research project (total value £112789) from the EPSRC for the research project Easy expression of authorisation policies. His co-investigator is Professor Angela Sasse from the University College London Computer Science Department.

The work aims to support e-Science resource owners who are not security experts to create authorisation policies for their e-science applications. The primary purpose of this 20 month long project is to allow Grid managers to be able to specify the authorisation policy for access to their Grid computing resources through the use of controlled natural language.

The policy tool will parse the policy, interpret it, and store it in its own internal representation, using a model and ontology developed at the start of the research. The policy will then be output in a pre-existing XML based policy language such as XACML or PERMIS, so that it can be fed directly into PDPs. In this way we can be assured that the policy written by the manager will actually be the one enforced by the software. The project involves existing research staff from the Lab (Mr Linying Su and Dr O Otenko).

The grant will commence early June 2006.

Prof. David Chadwick, University of Kent