How playing cards changed my view of access-control policies Kathi Fisler WPI Dept of Computer Science Friday, October 26^th, 2007 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. Fuller Labs 320 Web-based applications such as Google calendar and Microsoft HealthVault let end-users specify the access-control policies that govern their data. The policy languages in these tools seem simple, but prior results about policy languages suggest that tricky issues lurk under the surface and around the corner. We've been developing techniques to help end-users understand the implications of their policy decisions. This talk describes the subtleties underlying access policies, our ongoing efforts to help end-users deal with them, and how a simple card game that I encountered during sabbatical completely changed my view of the problem. ______ Kathi Fisler has been on the WPI CS faculty since 2000. Ongoing frustrations with unreadable documentation, spaghetti code, and buggy systems underlie her interests in formal specifications that enable effective communication across people and computing technologies. Host: Michael Gennert Refreshments will be served. Maintained by webmaster@cs.wpi.edu Last modified: October 16, 2007

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