2008 Articles

Path-based Access Control for Enterprise Networks

Burnside, Matthew Spindel; Keromytis, Angelos D.

Enterprise networks are ubiquitious and increasingly complex. The mechanisms for defining security policies in these networks have not kept up with the advancements in networking technology. In most cases, system administrators define policies on a per-application basis, and subsequently, these policies do not interact. For example, there is no mechanism that allows a web server to communicate decisions based on its ruleset to a firewall in front of it, even though decisions being made at the web server may be relevant to decisions at the firewall. In this paper, we describe a path-based access control system for service-oriented architecture (SOA)-style networks which allows services to pass access-control-related information to neighboring services, as the services process requests from outsiders and from each other. Path-based access control defends networks against a class of attacks wherein individual services make correct access control decisions but the resulting global network behavior is incorrect. We demonstrate the system in two forms, using graph-based policies and by leveraging the KeyNote trust management system.