[Monotone-devel] Re: Policy user model

[Bruce Stephens]

Timothy  Brownawell <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

> What we have (laws of nature)
> -----------------------------
>
> In general, a statement looks like: "Alice says that Bob is allowed to X
> under conditions Y.". Each statement has a principal (Alice), a subject
> (Bob), an action (X), and a condition (Y). The policy is a collection of
> statements, changing over time. It is not in general possible to know
> the order in which statements were made, unless one statement makes
> explicit mention of another (earlier) statement. The available actions
> (X) include the ability to make (specified kinds of) statements.

I think you also need "Alice says Bob is not allowed to X under
conditions Y", won't you?

Or does each state include all such assertions (with anything not
permitted, denied)?  In that case you could have one state being
"Alice says anybody is allowed to commit to branch X", and a successor
being "Alice says Bob is allowed to commit to branch X", meaning that
only Bob is allowed to.

I guess that works, and is fairly clean---probably cleaner than having
explicit revocations, I suspect, though I imagine the user interface
would express such things in terms of revoking permissions.

You're right, this does sound suspiciously like SecPAL or the earlier
KeyNote (RFC 2704).

[...]