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SecPAL is a declarative, logic-based, security policy language that has been developed to support the complex access control requirements of large scale distributed computing environments.^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4]

Common access control requirements

Here is a partial-list of some of the challenges that SecPAL addresses:

How does an organization establish a fine-grained trust relationship with another organization across organizational boundaries?
How does a user delegate a subset of a user’s rights (constrained delegation) to another user residing either in the same organization or in a different organization?
How can access control policy be authored and reviewed in a manner that is human readable - allowing auditors and non-technical people to understand such policies?
How does an organization support compliance regulations requiring that a system be able to demonstrate exactly why it was that a user was granted access to a resource?
How can policies be authored, composed and evaluated in a manner that is efficient, deterministic and tractable?

The SecPAL Research homepage includes links to the following papers which describe the architecture of SecPAL at varying levels of abstraction.^[5]

SecPAL Formal Model ("Design and Semantics of a Decentralized Authorization Language") – Formal description of the abstract types, language semantics and evaluation rules that support deterministic evaluation in efficient time.
SecPAL Schema Specification – Specification describing a practical XML based implementation of the formal model targeted at supporting access control requirements of distributed applications
.NET Research Implementation of SecPAL – C# implementation, C# samples for common authz patterns, and comprehensive developer documentation and a getting started tutorial

^ "SecPAL - Microsoft Research". research.microsoft.com. Archived from the original on 28 April 2016. Retrieved 12 January 2022.
^ "Microsoft Building Security Language for Grids". 13 September 2006.
^ "Microsoft Invites Collaboration with Grid Computing Research". 30 April 2007.
^ "Access Control in Grid Computing Environments". 7 May 2007.
^ "Microsoft – Cloud, Computers, Apps & Gaming". Archived from the original on 2009-11-06.
^ Marty Humphrey; et al. (2007). "Fine-grained access control for GridFTP using SecPAL". 2007 8th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Grid Computing. International Workshop on Grid Computing: IEEE Xplore. pp. 217–225. doi:10.1109/GRID.2007.4354136. ISBN 978-1-4244-1559-5. S2CID 14763595.
^ M.Y. Becker; et al. (2010). "A Practical Generic Privacy Language". In S. Jha; A. Mathuria (eds.). Information Systems Security. ICISS 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 6503. Berlin; Heidelberg: Springer. pp. 125–139. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-17714-9_10. ISBN 978-3-642-17714-9. S2CID 17197217.
^ Mo Becker; Alexander Malkis; Laurent Bussard (April 2010). "S4P: A Generic Language for Specifying Privacy Preferences and Policies". Microsoft. Retrieved 14 February 2023.