A Flexible and Dynamic Access Control Policy Framework for an Active Networking Environment

Abstract

To provide security for active networking nodes with respect to availability and controlled access the introduction of an access control mechanism and consequently a policy framework are mandatory. We follow the approach of a scenario-tailored runtime supervision of the service. During the development of the access control mechanism we strongly focused on keeping the mechanism as efficient as possible and to realize a modular design which allows to dynamically upgrade and configure the mechanism making use of the active networking technology itself while at the same time ensuring that mandatory security checks cannot be circumvented. Each service has to pass initial checks before it could be executed on an active node. Furthermore, also service-specific adaptive criterions could be included into the initial check. This paper discusses the corresponding flexible and dynamic access control policy framework and we also present results achieved with a first prototype realized for the active networking environment AMnet.