Configuration Of Network Devices Research Articles

Configuración de una red LAN utilizando Python scripting para generar redes definidas por software (SDN).

Network management is an essential task in modern organizations, where the complexity of technological infrastructures demands efficient and accurate solutions. With network devices from leading manufacturers such as Cisco and Mikrotik. In response to these challenges, automating the configuration of network devices has gained popularity as an approach to improve efficiency and reduce errors. Python, a programming language widely adopted for its versatility and ease of use, has become a key tool for this automation. Within this ecosystem, Netmiko emerges as a specialized library that facilitates automated interaction with network devices using SSH. Netmiko allows network administrators to write scripts that can connect to Cisco and Mikrotik devices, execute configuration commands, and retrieve information about the network status. This approach not only speeds up the configuration process, but also ensures consistency and accuracy in deploying configurations, especially in multi-device environments. As networks continue to grow in complexity, the adoption of tools such as Netmiko becomes essential to maintaining the operability and security of network infrastructures.

Approach to creation model of software-oriented communication network of the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine.

Enhancing the level of information resource protection of the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine, as a component of Ukraine's defense forces, is an important task, especially in times of war. An effective and reliable corporate network of the border agency becomes a key component for ensuring security, coordination, and responsiveness to both internal and external threats. One aspect of developing the information space is the development of the transport network of the State Border Guard Service. Analysis of existing technologies, identifying their advantages and disadvantages, allowed for the identification of Software-Defined Wide Area Networking technology as the one that best meets the conformity criteria defined by the experts of the Communication and Information Systems Management. This technology not only allows for optimizing network traffic and ensuring high-speed data transmission but also guarantees flexibility in network management and enhances security. For the State Border Guard Service, responsible for the security of the country's borders, the use of advanced Software-Defined Wide Area Networking technologies can be crucial for optimizing operations and ensuring the highest level of information security. The article focuses on developing a conceptual model for building the corporate network of the State Border Guard Service based on Software-Defined Wide Area Networking technology. The main goal of the research is to consider the possibility of implementing this technology in the context of its application by Ukraine's defense forces and to analyze its advantages and disadvantages. The research task was to study the technical aspects of implementing Software-Defined Wide Area Networking, namely: configuration of network devices, traffic management, security monitoring, and data protection. Cisco's Software-Defined Wide Area Networking has applied an optimal approach to network architecture, which separates the control plane from the data plane of all peripheral routers and implements all control functions in a centralized software controller called vSmart. Practical recommendations from the research allowed for ensuring continuous network service by rerouting around failures and potential causes of downtime.

A multimodal dual-fusion entity extraction model for large and complex devices

In the context of large and complex devices with a multi-source heterogeneous data environment, the extraction of network device configuration related entity information from diverse modalities of the Internet of Things data is a crucial and fundamental step towards establishing a domain knowledge graph for global Zero Touch Provisioning of network devices. In this paper, we present a novel multimodal dual-fusion entity extraction model that serves as a foundation for an intelligent and efficient network device configuration process. Firstly, the multimodal data is encoded, followed by the ViLBERT pre-training model to obtain more feature information of entities for multimodal front-end fusion. Next, the attention weights of each modal feature are learned through a multilayer neural network classifier and probabilistic graphical model, facilitating multimodal back-end fusion and reducing information redundancy. Finally, entity recognition is accomplished by employing a cohesive memory module that extracts the essential parameters for device configuration. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed model performs exceptionally well on the MSCOCO2017 public dataset and the SFZK-Dev data network device dataset, with F1 values of the comprehensive evaluation index of model quality at 94.65% and 96.94%, respectively, indicating high stability. Additionally, the link prediction metrics HITS@1 achieved accuracy levels of 58.21% and 68.04%.

Towards a Critical Review of Cybersecurity Risks in Anti-Poaching Systems

Anti-poaching operations increasingly make use of a wide variety of technology for intelligence and communications. These technologies introduce cybersecurity risk, and they need to be secured to provide greater protection to the information and people involved in anti-poaching operations, ultimately protecting vulnerable animals better. A hypothetical network of anti-poaching technologies was simulated in Graphical Network Simulator 3 (GNS3), consisting of various field devices identified in the literature, and a main control room with relevant hardware devices. A virtual Kali Linux machine was connected to the network and played the role of a digital attacker or intruder. Several cyber-attacks were carried out, to show the risks inherent to such an interoperable and socio-technical network. These attacks included Man in the Middle (MitM) and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. These attacks were then mitigated via system configurations. Further risks and threat considerations were identified in the literature. Using the STRIDE, DREAD and Attack Tree threat models, the risks to an anti-poaching network were classified and calculated. The most prevalent threats and the attacks performed in the simulation were all calculated to have a high risk level, posing a great threat to an unsecured network. The STRIDE classes of Denial of Service and Elevation of Privilege posed the most risk to the system, both having a calculated average risk score of 9 out of 10. Mitigations to general network threats and those identified in the simulation are mentioned. Additionally, authentication for such a system was investigated, as improper authentication practices were deemed a risk and provides a foothold for further risks in the network. Recommendations made, include the proper configuration of network devices, especially the router and switch, and the use of anti-virus, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems, as well as having an external audit performed annually. Multi-factor authentication, with a password/fingerprint combination, is recommended.

SMART Intent-Driven Network Management

Future communication networks will provide full life cycle network management. However, the complexity of the network management should be reduced even without the requirements of the technical knowledge. Meanwhile, the network expects to be managed in a fully automated manner with humans out of the loop. The emerging intent-driven network (IDN) provides a structured method of specifying the management intent, which is automatically translated and deployed into a network device configuration. In this article, we first introduce the motivations of the IDN and provide an overview of the IDN in various fields. From the perspectives of network systems and user perception, we illustrate the five levels of achieving full autonomous network management. Then we propose an intent-driven network management architecture. In particular, we focus on a specific kind of network management intent, which can be measurable and achievable, leading to rewarding and time-bound full life cycle management, called SMART. Moreover, we give technical details of the SMART architecture. Finally, we develop an intent platform based on OpenStack and present the intent system demonstration interface.

Implementation of a Policer-Based Control Loop For The Dynamic Resource Allocation of a Software-Defined Communication Infrastructure

The use of solutions based on the principles of virtualization is designed to increase the efficiency of using the communication infrastructure due to the dynamic distribution of existing communication and computing resources between their virtual components. The software management of the communication infrastructure components opens up opportunities for applying new approaches to solving the currently very urgent problem of ensuring the required Quality of Service. Taking into account the current trends in the development of communication infrastructures and means of their automation, it seems relevant to build systems that implement a closed cycle of communication infrastructure resource management based on traditional and promising tools for monitoring and managing QoS and studying its behavior. Closing the control loop is achieved by implementing a control script that automatically responds to changes in the transmitted data and makes decisions about changing the current configuration of network devices. One of the approaches to building a closed control loop is to change the physical bandwidth of a virtual communication channel depending on the intensity of its resource use. The paper considers an example of the implementation of a closed control loop based on the rules of the policy for limiting the rate of sending packets of heterogeneous traffic and compares the approach of dynamic bandwidth redistribution with traditional approaches.

Towards Distributed SDN: Mobility Management and Flow Scheduling in Software Defined Urban IoT

The growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices with multiple radio interfaces has resulted in a number of urban-scale deployments of IoT multinetworks, where heterogeneous wireless communication solutions coexist (e.g., WiFi, Bluetooth, Cellular). Managing the multinetworks for seamless IoT access and handover, especially in mobile environments, is a key challenge. Software-defined networking (SDN) is emerging as a promising paradigm for quick and easy configuration of network devices, but its application in urban-scale multinetworks requiring heterogeneous and frequent IoT access is not well studied. In this paper we present UbiFlow, the first software-defined IoT system for combined ubiquitous flow control and mobility management in urban heterogeneous networks. UbiFlow adopts multiple controllers to divide urban-scale SDN into different geographic partitions (assigning one controller per partition) and achieve distributed control of IoT flows. A distributed hashing based overlay structure is proposed to maintain network scalability and consistency. Based on this UbiFlow overlay structure, the relevant issues pertaining to mobility management such as scalable control, fault tolerance, and load balancing have been carefully examined and studied. The UbiFlow controller differentiates flow scheduling based on per-device requirements and whole-partition capabilities. Therefore, it can present a network status view and optimized selection of access points in multinetworks to satisfy IoT flow requests, while guaranteeing network performance for each partition. Simulation and realistic testbed experiments confirm that UbiFlow can successfully achieve scalable mobility management and robust flow scheduling in IoT multinetworks; e.g., 67.21 percent throughput improvement, 72.99 percent reduced delay, and 69.59 percent jitter improvements, compared with alternative SDN systems.

A semantic data lake framework for autonomous fault management in SDN environments

AbstractFault Management is a vital issue for any network operator since the beginning of the telecommunications era. As networks have become more and more complex, their management systems are crucial for any operator company. In this ecosystem, the Software‐Defined Networking (SDN) approach has appeared as a possible solution for different networking issues. The flexibility provided by SDN to the network management enables a great dynamism in the configuration of network devices. However, this feature introduces the cost of a potential increase in failures because every modification introduced on the control plane is a new possibility for failures to appear and cause a decrement of the quality for offered services. Because of the growing pace of the networks, the classical approach is not feasible to cope that dynamism. Increasing the number of human operators in charge of the fault management process would increase the operation cost dramatically. Thus, this paper presents an approach to apply machine learning over a big data framework for an autonomous fault management process in SDN networks. In this paper, we present a Semantic Data Lake framework for a self‐diagnosis service, which is deployed on top of an SDN management platform. Moreover, we have developed a prototype of the proposed service with different diagnosis models for SDN networks. Models and algorithms have been evaluated showing good results.

ARKHAM: An Advanced Refinement toolkit for Handling Service Level Agreements in Software-Defined Networking

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) provides a more sophisticated and flexible architecture for managing and monitoring network traffic. SDN moves part of the decision-making logic (i.e., flow processing and packet routing) from network devices into a logically centralized controller. However, the expected behavior and configuration of network devices are often defined directly in the controller as static rules for specific situations. This approach becomes an issue when associated with an increasing number of network elements, links, and services, resulting in a large amount of rules and a high overhead related to network configuration. As an alternative, techniques such as Policy-Based Network Management (PBNM) and more specifically policy refinement can be used by operators to write Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in a user-friendly interface without the need to manually reconfigure each network device. To address these issues, we specifically introduce ARKHAM: an Advanced Refinement Toolkit for Handling SLAs in SDN. In this article, we present (i) a policy authoring framework that uses logical reasoning for the specification of business-level goals and to automate their refinement; (ii) an OpenFlow controller which performs information gathering and configuration deployment; (iii) a policy repository that stores information about the behavior of the infrastructure, which is obtained by the OpenFlow Controller, and policy authoring operations; and (iv) a formal representation using event calculus that describes our solution. The main contributions of this work are (i) the capacity to deploy refined policies with minimal human intervention; (ii) analysis of the infrastructure's ability to fulfill the requirements of high-level policies; (iii) decreased amount of network rules coded into the controller; and (iv) management and deployment of new rules with minimal disruption to the network. The experimental results demonstrate that the refinement toolkit achieves the expected results within acceptable performance bounds, even with the increasing complexity and size of SLAs, network topologies, and repositories.

A Declarative Approach to Network Device Configuration Correctness

Configuration Logic (CL) is a formal language that allows a network engineer to express constraints in terms of the actual parameters found in the configuration of network devices. We present an efficient algorithm that can automatically check a pool of devices for conformance to a set of CL constraints; moreover, this algorithm can point to the part of the configuration responsible for the error when a constraint is violated. Contrary to other validation approaches that require dumping the configuration of the whole network to a central location in order to be verified, we also present an algorithm that analyzes the correct formulas and greatly helps reduce the amount of data that need to be transferred to that central location, pushing as much of the evaluation of the formula locally on each device. The procedure is also backwards-compatible, in such a way that a device that does not (or only partially) supports a local evaluation may simply return a subset or all of its configuration. These capabilities have been integrated into a network management tool called ValidMaker.

Privacy in content-oriented networking

As the Internet struggles to cope with scalability, mobility, and security issues, new network architectures are being proposed to better accommodate the needs of modern systems and applications. In particular, Content-Oriented Networking (CON) has emerged as a promising next-generation Internet architecture: it sets to decouple content from hosts, at the network layer, by naming data rather than hosts. CON comes with a potential for a wide range of benefits, including reduced congestion and improved delivery speed by means of content caching, simpler configuration of network devices, and security at the data level. However, it remains an interesting open question whether or not, and to what extent, this emerging networking paradigm bears new privacy challenges. In this paper, we provide a systematic privacy analysis of CON and the common building blocks among its various architectural instances in order to highlight emerging privacy threats, and analyze a few potential countermeasures. Finally, we present a comparison between CON and today's Internet in the context of a few privacy concepts, such as, anonymity, censoring, traceability, and confidentiality.

A survey of virtual LAN usage in campus networks

VLANs are widely used in today's enterprise networks to improve Ethernet scalability and support network policies. However, manuals and textbooks offer very little information about how VLANs are actually used in practice. Through discussions with network administrators and analysis of configuration data, we describe how three university campuses and one academic department use VLANs to achieve a variety of goals. We argue that VLANs are ill-suited to some of these goals (e.g., VLANs are often used to realize access control policies, but constrain the types of policies that can be expressed). Furthermore, the use of VLANs leads to significant complexity in the configuration of network devices.

Network configuration management using NETCONF and YANG

The Internet Engineering Task Force has standardized a new network configuration management protocol called NETCONF, which provides mechanisms to install, manipulate, and delete the configuration of network devices. This article describes the NETCONF protocol and a recently introduced NETCONF data modeling language called YANG. The YANG language allows data modelers to define the syntax and semantics of device configurations, and supports translations to several XML schema languages.

Hardening Network Infrastructure: Not Suitable for Everyone

A review of Hardening Network Infrastructure by Wesley Noonan. The author gives readers a guide to securing networks, firewalls, switches, and so on. Although much of the book is dedicated to explaining security techniques, it should not be used as a textbook for these topics. Everything is oriented toward the configuration of network devices. The author spends much time explaining technologies and reviewing other important security issues.