A controlled natural language interface for authoring access control policies

With increasingly distributed computing systems, the management task of controlling access to shared resources becomes more and more complicated. Policy based access control systems may provide a solution to this problem, but the issue then becomes one of how to easily specify access control policies. We have designed and implemented a user interface that enables novice users to author their own access control policies using a controlled natural language (CNL) interface. With this interface, users are able to author their policies by typing sentences in a sub set of the English language. The sentences are then parsed and output as a machine readable policy, ready for automatic enforcement by a policy decision point (PDP). In this paper we describe the details of the design and implementation of this CNL interface, along with a summary of the user evaluation.