XpressRules LLC — Department of Commerce SBIR Phase I: N/A

Description

This proposal represents a collaborative response by XpressRules and NIST to a two-fold demand from the information security marketplace. The business requirement (for true policy governance) is that asset owners and steward themselves-and not IT—become directly accountable for the life cycles of their rules and policies. The technical requirement (for an adequate data model) is that the policies themselves embody sufficient semantic content so as to enable effective “pre-emptive analytics”—the ability for policy analysts to discover logical leaks and gaps before a policy is deployed. For attributebased access control (ABAC) NIST center-staged the human manager by defining and demonstrating natural language policy (NLP) in its Guide to ABAC (SP 800-162). In addition the NIST standardization and current implementation of Policy Machine/New Generation Access Control (PM/NGAC) provides the semantics-rich graph-based data model required for robust policy analytics. The goal of this proposal is to exploit and commercialize both of these NIST initiatives with XpressRules-PM, a product with (1) an adaptive NL human-computer interface (HCI) that empowers business users—in their own words—to manage policies and the policy authoring environment and (2) a dynamic graph-based policy representation that allows for effective policy analytics.