Modular Construction of DTE Policies

This paper describes a tool which composes a policy for a fine-grained mandatory access control system (DTE) from a set of mostly independent policy modules. For a large system with many services, a DTE policy becomes unwieldy. However, many system services and security extensions can be considered to be largely standalone. By providing for explicit grouping, namespaces, and globbing by namespaces, inter-module access rules can be made generic enough to permit modules to be mixed and matched as needed. As a result, it becomes easier to extend a policy, debug a policy, and to distribute meaningful policy modules with new software.