Abstract:

In an increasingly interconnected world, access control grows in 
complexity and importance. It is also a fascinating area. Some of its 
problems border on deep philosophy. "What is trust really?" is the Auguste 
Rodin thinker thinking of, I think. The broad question of interest to us is 
this:  How to make distributed access control secure, uniform, practical and
amenable to analysis? Logic has been employed to address the broad question.
After a quick introduction to the area, we will present Distributed 
Knowledge Authorization Language, in short DKAL, a new authorization 
language for distributed systems that achieves greater expressivity than the
previous languages within the same feasibility constraints. DKAL was 
developed by Itay Neeman of UCLA and the speaker. More information about 
DKAL is found at
http://research.microsoft.com/~gurevich/Opera/191ea.pdf,
but we attempt to make the talk self-contained.


Bio: Yuri Gurevich is Principal Researcher at Microsoft in Redmond, WA. He 
joined Microsoft Research 10 years ago and built a group on Foundations of 
Software Engineering that eventually created the Spec Explorer tool. Now 
Yuri is an individual contributor; management is hard while technical work 
is fun. He is also Prof. Emeritus at U. of Michigan, ACM Fellow, Guggenheim 
Fellow, member of Academia Europaea, and Dr. Honoris Causa of Limburg 
University in Belgium and of Ural State University in Russia.