HP Labs Technical Reports

A Generic Approach to Policy Description in System Management

Goh, Cheh

HPL-97-82

Keyword(s): system management; policy; constraint-based; policy enforcement

Abstract: The versatility of policy for use in system management depends a lot on the descriptive power of the policy language. An examination of existing approaches reveals a way of taking a generic constraint-based approach to describing policies. This unified approach takes the view that policies can be completely described according to the constraints of the system, and the categorisation and attributes of policy that previous works highlighted can be understood as convenient interfaces for the development and management of policy. We also introduce the concept of active and passive policy enforcement and explain how this classification helps us understand the underlying constraint-based approach.

8 Pages

Back to Index