Scaling Up Proactive Enforcement

Runtime enforcers receive events from a system and output commands ensuring the system’s policy compliance. Proactive enforcers extend traditional (reactive) enforcers by emitting commands at any time, rather only as a response to system actions. However, proactive enforcers have so far lacked support for many useful policy features. This, along with the existing tools’ poor performance, hinders their adoption. We present a performance-optimized, proactive enforcement algorithm for a rich policy language: metric first-order temporal logic with function applications, aggregations, and let bindings. We have implemented this algorithm in EnfGuard, the first proactive enforcer tool that supports the above constructs. We evaluated our tool using a novel set of six benchmarks containing both real-world and synthetic policies and logs, demonstrating that it enforces realistic policies out-of-the-box and achieves the necessary performance to be used in real-time systems.