Managing Critical Infrastructures through Virtual Network Communities

Abstract

Virtual Interacting Network CommunIty (Vinci) is an abstract architecture to share in a secure way an ICT infrastructure among several user communities, each with its own applications and security requirements. To each community, Vinci allocates a network of virtual machines (VMs) that is mapped onto the computational and communication resources of the infrastructure. Each network includes several kinds of VMs. Application VMs (APP-VMs) run applications and stores information shared within a community. File system VM (FS-VMs) store and protect files shared among communities by applying a combination of MAC and Multi-Level Security (MLS) policies. A firewall VM (FW-VM) is a further kind of VM that, according to the security policy of each community, protects information private to a community transmitted across an untrusted network or controls the information exchanged with other communities. The last kind of VM is the administrative VM (A-VM) that configures and manages the other VMs in a community as well as the resources of each physical node and it also assures the integrity of all the VMs. After describing the overall Vinci architecture, we present and discuss the implementation and the performance of a first prototype.