Automated Policy Combination for Data Sharing across Multiple Organizations

During business consolidation, multiple organizations need to share data for common interests. However, these organizations may apply different or even conflicting policies, on account of different rules and rule combining algorithms chosen by them. Thus, it is necessary to combine policies from multiple organizations into a global one to manage the access to the shared data. Existing policy combining approaches are unable to automatically combine policies into a global one. In this paper, we propose an approach to address the issue of multiple policies combination. Its key idea is to first decompose the rules in each policy into various classes, and then combine the rules of the corresponding classes to a global compact policy. The latter ensures compliance with each of the original policies at the syntax and semantic levels. To validate our approach, we provide a proof-of-concept implementation of the automated policy combination.