CSchema: A Downgrading Policy Language for XML Access Control

The problem of regulating access to XML documents has attracted much attention from both academic and industry communities. In existing approaches, the XML elements specified by access policies are either accessible or inaccessible according to their sensitivity. However, in some cases, the original XML elements are sensitive and inaccessible, but after being processed in some appropriate ways, the results become insensitive and thus accessible. This paper proposes a policy language to accommodate such cases, which can express the downgrading operations on sensitive data in XML documents through explicit calculations on them. The proposed policy language is called calculation-embedded schema (CSchema), which extends the ordinary schema languages with protection type for protecting sensitive data and specifying downgrading operations. CSchema language has a type system to guarantee the type correctness of the embedded calculation expressions and moreover this type system also generates a security view after type checking a CSchema policy. Access policies specified by CSchema are enforced by a validation procedure, which produces the released documents containing only the accessible data by validating the protected documents against CSchema policies. These released documents are then ready to be accessed by, for instance, XML query engines. By incorporating this validation procedure, other XML processing technologies can use CSchema as the access control module. Supported by the Program “Comprehensive Development of e-Society Foundation Software” of the MEXT, Japan, under the project “Programmable Structured Documents”.