Automatic Consistency Checking for IPSec/VPN Security Policy


 

Although various IPSec policy issues have attracted a lot of attention, within the IETF IPSP (IP Security Policy) working group, there is a certain amount of confusion and concern about two fundamental issues: 1) How to ensure the correctness of a set of distributed security policies. 2) How to systematically determine the correct set of policies and securely distribute them across the network. The Internet will become more and more dynamic in many aspects. With the capability of various wireless network technologies, users and even sub-networks can be mobile. Mobility implies potential changes in the policies or the inter-relations among distributed policies. Adaptive security is another cause of policy changes. It will be uncommon in the near future that, in reacting to a newly detected intrusion, a security management system might on-the-fly determine to strengthen the security level by modifying the IPSec security policies. Therefore, it is critically important to have a safe and rigorous solution to handle the above two issues.

Research Goals

Policy Specification Correctness
Currently, in the research community of IPSec/VPN policy, to our best knowledge, no rigorous definition for IPSec/VPN policy correctness has been developed. We will give a formal and reasonable definition for correctness such that we will have a basis for policy specification analysis. Such correctness analysis must be automated so that the security configuration of a network system can adapt to changes, faults/intrusions, and mobility. On the other hand, if there are inherent constraints and conflicts among the existing security policies such that it is impossible to have a consistent policy set, the policy analysis engine should also automatically determine the impossibility.

Approach

Inter-domain Secure Policy Distribution
The proposed work under the first issue assumes that we have a perfect and centralized collection of information related to the policies and security requirements around the whole Internet. However, in reality, this might not always be possible, as Internet is owned and managed by different administrative domains, while, for trust and privacy considerations, information regarding local policy and network topology might not be sharable across domain boundaries. The second objective of this research is, under some inter-domain related constraints, to develop a collaborative framework/architecture and a suite of distributed protocols such that we can still analyze the correctness of a set of decentralized IPSec/VPN policies. We will study the issue of the minimum amount of policy information needed for a particular policy domain to determine whether its local policies and requirements will be consistent with other domains. Once the set of policies is decided, a policy distribution mechanism is also needed. Under this project, we will first focus on the theoretical aspect of policy and requirement specifications and their analysis. We will develop algorithms and analytical results to fundamentally enhance our current technology in policy-driven networking systems such as IPSec/VPN. Second, we plan on implementing a prototype to validate and evaluate our proposed approach on a realistic networking environment. The first phase will be a small testbed to run the prototype software, which will be open sourced and available to the community. Furthermore, we would like to collaborate with industry partners such as equipment vendors and ISPs to further evaluate and validate our approach against real-world challenges. We will pay special attention to the application of our solutions in a mobile network environment. In such an environment, the capability of dynamically updating IPSec security policy is extremely critical.

Expected Results

To summarize, we will not only deliver academic publications about our work, but will also produce a prototype system and perform extensive experiments, including the real-world data set if possible, to evaluate the performance and accuracy and to validate our theoretical model in handling difficulty issues in policy-driven networking systems.
Funding

NSF ITR

Contact person:
S. Felix Wu
wu@cs.ucdavis.edu

last modified 3/29/02