2008 Reports

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 must define policies on a per-application basis, and subsequently, these policies do not interact. For example, there is no mechanism that allows a firewall to communicate decisions based on its ruleset to a web server behind it, even though decisions being made at the firewall may be relevant to decisions made at the web server. In this paper, we describe a path-based access control system which allows applications in a network to pass access-control-related information to neighboring applications, as the applications process requests from outsiders and from each other. This system defends networks against a class of attacks wherein individual applications may make correct access control decisions but the resulting network behavior is incorrect. We demonstrate the system on service-oriented architecture (SOA)-style networks, in two forms, using graph-based policies, and leveraging the KeyNote trust management system.