A modal logic for authorization specification and reasoning

Authorization policies provide access control to the system resource. This paper proposes a formal modal logic approach for the specification and reasoning about authorizations. Especially we investigate and handle the situation where the security agent´s knowledge is not specific and the decisions for accessing the system resource are to be made based on the agent´s knowledge. We introduce modal logic to specify and reason about security policies, then translate the domain into an epistemic logic program. We also present a case study to demonstrate the proposed approach. This approach has an expressive power to describe a variety of complex security scenarios.