15th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop (CSFW'02)
A Logic for Reasoning about Digital Rights
Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada
June 24-June 26
ISBN: 0-7695-1689-0
We present a logic for reasoning about licenses, which are "terms of use" for digital resources. The logic provides a language for writing both properties of licenses and specifications that govern a client?s actions. We discuss the complexity of checking properties and specifiations written in our logic and propose a technique for verification. A key feature of our approach is that it is essentially parameterized by the language in which the licenses are written, provided that this language can be given a trace-based semantics. We consider two license languages to illustrate this flexibility.