The Mathematical Foundations for Mapping Policies to Network Devices

Dinesha Ranathunga, Matthew Roughan, Phil Kernick, Nick Falkner

2016

Abstract

A common requirement in policy specification languages is the ability to map policies to the underlying network devices. Doing so, in a provably correct way, is important in a security policy context, so administrators can be confident of the level of protection provided by the policies for their networks. Existing policy languages allow policy composition but lack formal semantics to allocate policy to network devices. Our research tackles this from first principles: we ask how network policies can be described at a high-level, independent of vendor and network minutiae. We identify the algebraic requirements of the policy-mapping process and propose semantic foundations to formally verify if a policy is implemented by the correct set of policy-arbiters. We show the value of our proposed algebras in maintaining concise network-device configurations by applying them to real-world networks.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Ranathunga D., Roughan M., Kernick P. and Falkner N. (2016). The Mathematical Foundations for Mapping Policies to Network Devices . In Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on e-Business and Telecommunications - Volume 4: SECRYPT, (ICETE 2016) ISBN 978-989-758-196-0, pages 197-206. DOI: 10.5220/0005946201970206

in Bibtex Style

@conference{secrypt16,
author={Dinesha Ranathunga and Matthew Roughan and Phil Kernick and Nick Falkner},
title={The Mathematical Foundations for Mapping Policies to Network Devices},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on e-Business and Telecommunications - Volume 4: SECRYPT, (ICETE 2016)},
year={2016},
pages={197-206},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0005946201970206},
isbn={978-989-758-196-0},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on e-Business and Telecommunications - Volume 4: SECRYPT, (ICETE 2016)
TI - The Mathematical Foundations for Mapping Policies to Network Devices
SN - 978-989-758-196-0
AU - Ranathunga D.
AU - Roughan M.
AU - Kernick P.
AU - Falkner N.
PY - 2016
SP - 197
EP - 206
DO - 10.5220/0005946201970206