Network Security Policy Verification

Cornelius Diekmann 🌐

July 4, 2014

This is a development version of this entry. It might change over time and is not stable. Please refer to release versions for citations.

Abstract

We present a unified theory for verifying network security policies. A security policy is represented as directed graph. To check high-level security goals, security invariants over the policy are expressed. We cover monotonic security invariants, i.e. prohibiting more does not harm security. We provide the following contributions for the security invariant theory.
  • Secure auto-completion of scenario-specific knowledge, which eases usability.
  • Security violations can be repaired by tightening the policy iff the security invariants hold for the deny-all policy.
  • An algorithm to compute a security policy.
  • A formalization of stateful connection semantics in network security mechanisms.
  • An algorithm to compute a secure stateful implementation of a policy.
  • An executable implementation of all the theory.
  • Examples, ranging from an aircraft cabin data network to the analysis of a large real-world firewall.
  • More examples: A fully automated translation of high-level security goals to both firewall and SDN configurations (see Examples/Distributed_WebApp.thy).
For a detailed description, see

License

BSD License

History

April 14, 2015
Added Distributed WebApp example and improved graphviz visualization (revision 4dde08ca2ab8)

Topics

Session Network_Security_Policy_Verification