On the 20th of June, Christopher Esterhuyse and Tim Mueller presented their paper (with L. Thomas van Binsbergen) on the novel JustAct framework at the 2024 DisCoTec federated conference, held this year in Groningen. JustAct lays a foundation for the automatic enforcement of policies that are changed by the users on the fly.
Abstract
Inter-organisational data exchange is regulated by norms originating from sources ranging from individual consent to (inter)national laws. Verifying norm-compliance is complex because laws (e.g., GDPR) distribute responsibility and require accountability. Moreover, in some domains (e.g., healthcare), the norms themselves may be private. In contrast, standard solutions (e.g., access- and usage-control, smart contracts) reason about policies that are assumed to be public. Instead, we present a novel framework prescribing how decentralised agents decide which actions are justified, despite their partial views of the policy. Crucially, justifications are universal, e.g., accepted by future auditors. Agents establish a common notion of compliance through an (externally synchronized) agreement, which is the basis of each justification defined by policy fragments agents autonomously create, gossip, and assemble.
Christopher Esterhuyse
PhD Candidate
Christopher is a PhD student working on the formal modelling of distributed systems, and leveraging them for various benefits. For example, (1) writing models helps us concretize our thoughts, (2) communicating models affords unambiguous communication of requirements, expectations, and so on, and (3) having a model affords automated checking of system properties. Work revolves around the application domain, e.g., asking “what concepts are worth formalizing?” Work also revolves around the languages themselves, e.g., asking “what makes a language practical?”
Tim Müller
Scientific Programmer
