Policy Translation Point (PTP)

PTP translates high-level security policies like “Do not record sound in the living room tonight” into low-level policies in a XACML formalism. Furthermore, PTP detects potential conflicts linke redundancies and inconsistencies between high-level policies.

HTTP APIs

The documentation of the HTTP APIs exposed by PTP is available here.

Instructions to install PTP on Docker

To install PTP on Docker, you will need to create three different containers:

1. ptp-server: a container that hosts the backend server (a Spring Boot application written in Java) and the frontend (an Angular application written in TypeScript).
2. ptp-db: a container that hosts a MySql server. A docker volume will be attached to this container to persist the data permanently on the Docker Host, rather than just for the lifetime of the container.
3. ptp-inspector: a container to connect to the ptp-db container and run SQL commands in order to import the initial database schema.

1 - Setup the Docker Environment

To make ptp-server and ptp-db communicate between each other, you have to create a Docker Network. The following command creates a new Docker Network called ptp-network

$ docker network create --driver=bridge ptp-network

Then, you can create the ptp-db container;

$ docker run --name ptp-db -v ptp-db:/var/lib/mysql -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=root -e MYSQL_DATABASE=sifis_ptp --network ptp-network -d mysql:5.7

Here, root is the password of the MySql root account, while sifis_ptpis the name of the database that will be exploited by the web application.

After creating the the container for the MySql server, you will have to create the ptp-inspectorcontainer:

$ docker run -dit --name ptp-inspector --network ptp-network alpine ash

Through the inspector, you can copy the SQL file of the database (available in the root folder of this project):

$ docker cp schema.sql ptp-inspector:/tmp/schema.sql

Then, attach our STDIN, STDOUT and STDERR to the container, in order to set it up properly:

$ docker container attach ptp-inspector

and install a MySQL client and an HTTP client through the following command:

# apk update && apk upgrade && apk add mysql-client curl

You now have a MySQL client as well as an SQL file in /tmp/schema.sql that you can import:

# mysql -h ptp-db -u root -p sifis_ptp < /tmp/schema.sql

The SQL schema should now be created, you can exit from the container by hitting CTRL+P CTRL+Q successively in order to detach STDIN, STDOUT and STDERR from the container which will bring you back to your local shell session.

2 - Build and Deploy the Web Application

After setting up the Docker environment, you have to build the docker image for the ptp-server container.

First, run this command to generate the required Maven files and folders:

mvn -N wrapper:wrapper

Then, use this command to build the image:

$ docker build -t ptp-server .

Finally, you can run the ptp-server container:

$ docker run -d -p 8080:8080 --name ptp-server --network ptp-network ptp-server

The web application should be accessible at http://localhost:8080/