Filtering postures: local enforcement for global policies

  • Authors:
  • J. D. Guttman

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • SP '97 Proceedings of the 1997 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
  • Year:
  • 1997

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Abstract

A Abstract: When packet filtering is used as a security mechanism, different routers may need to cooperate to enforce the desired security policy. It is difficult to ensure that they will do so correctly. We introduce a simple language for expressing global network access control policies of a kind that filtering routers are capable of enforcing. We then introduce an algorithm that, given the network topology, will compute a set of filters for the individual routers; these filters are guaranteed to enforce the policy correctly. Since these filters may not provide optimal service, a human must sometimes alter them. A second algorithm compares a resulting set of filters to the global network access control policy to determine all policy violations, or to report that none exist. A prototype implementation demonstrates that the algorithms are efficient enough to give quick answers to questions of realistic scale.