Abstract: A system and method for authorization policy analysis. A policy analyzer answers first-order questions about authorization policies by reducing the policies to Satisfiability modulo theories (SMT). Input to the analyzer includes a policy to be analyzed and a schema for that policy. If the policy passes strict validation against the schema, then the analyzer symbolically evaluates the policy to encode its semantics as an SMT expression. The SMT expression is used for formulate a desired query about policy behavior such as, for example, if there is any input on which two policies both evaluate to true. The reduction to SMT produces a quantifier-free formula in a combination of decidable theories to support large scale deployments. This reduction is achieved by focusing the analysis on policies that pass strict validation, rather than attempting to analyze arbitrary policies.

Abstract: A system and method for authorization policy evaluation. Authorization policies are authored in a general-purpose authorization language. An evaluation engine is used in a provider network by application developers to manage access within their applications based on fine-grained permissions. The policy language combines elements of role-based and attributed-based access control within an intuitive syntax and efficient evaluation strategy. The policy syntax separates role-based expressions of a policy from attribute-based expressions of the policy.