Building a Dynamic Interoperable Security Architecture for Active Networks

Abstract

Abstract : Security is viewed as one of the major obstacles to the widespread deployment active networks. A significant challenge is to develop mechanisms to change software state on routers dynamically, without sacrificing protection guarantees. The Seraphim projects leverages the inherent dynamism in the paradigm to build dynamic security mechanisms for active networks. Seraphim's security architecture is component based, dynamically extensible, and reflective, and supports a variety of policy strategies and enforcement mechanisms. This enabled the development of customizable, interoperable, domain-specific, or task-specific security policies and mechanisms, to meet the security requirements of active network entities. Administrators were able to develop security policies as active network capsules, called dynamic policies, and enforce these policies by executing them in a suitable software context on active network routers. A suite of confidentiality, integrity, authentication and access-control mechanisms was developed to secure the node of an active network. This suite was based on standardized APIs and provided support for customized Quality of Protection guarantees. Customized dynamic policies were created and installed at run-time, trading functionality for performance, to implement low-overhead solutions that were able to successfully counter threats and attack, without sacrificing protection guarantees.