  Ensuring compliance of organizations to federal regulations is a growing
concern. This paper presents a framework and methods to verify whether an
implemented low-level security policy is compliant to a high-level security
policy. Our compliance checking framework is based on organizational and
security metadata to support refinement of high-level concepts to
implementation specific instances. Our work uses the results of refinement
calculus to express valid refinement patterns and their properties.
Intuitively, a low-level security policy is compliant to a high-level security
policy if there is a valid refinement path from the high-level security policy
to the low-level security policy. Our model is capable of detecting violations
of security policies, failures to meet obligations, and capability and modal
conflicts.
