Network Security Management with High-level Security Policies

Abstract:

A key issue in network security management
is how to define a formal security policy.
A good policy specification should be easy
to get right and relatively stable, even in
a dynamically changing network. Much work
has been done in automating network security
management. But the policy languages used
are usually operational and do not explicitly
express the underlying security goal.

We propose an approach where policy is defined
as statements of desired security properties,
whose compliance can be checked automatically
by analyzing the configuration of the network.
We use a simple policy model, the data access-
control list (DACL) to demonstrate this idea.
We present a framework and corresponding algorithms
for checking that low-level configurations
altogether uphold the high-level DACL policy,
taking into consideration potential software
vulnerabilities.