Biblio

Network policies govern the use of an institution's networks, and are usually written in a high-level human-readable natural language. Normally these policies are enforced by low-level, technically detailed network configurations. The translation from network policies into network configurations is a tedious, manual and error-prone process. To address this issue, we propose a new intermediate language called POlicy LANguage for Campus Operations (POLANCO), which is a human-readable network policy definition language intended to approximate natural language. Because POLANCO is a high-level language, the translation from natural language policies to POLANCO is straightforward. Despite being a high-level human readable language, POLANCO can be used to express network policies in a technically precise way so that policies written in POLANCO can be automatically translated into a set of software defined networking (SDN) rules and actions that enforce the policies. Moreover, POLANCO is capable of incorporating information about the current network state, reacting to changes in the network and adjusting SDN rules to ensure network policies continue to be enforced correctly. We present policy examples found on various public university websites and show how they can be written as simplified human-readable statements using POLANCO and how they can be automatically translated into SDN rules that correctly enforce these policies.

The consistency checking of network security policy is an important issue of network security field, but current studies lack of overall security strategy modeling and entire network checking. In order to check the consistency of policy in distributed network system, a security policy model is proposed based on network topology, which checks conflicts of security policies for all communication paths in the network. First, the model uniformly describes network devices, domains and links, abstracts the network topology as an undirected graph, and formats the ACL (Access Control List) rules into quintuples. Then, based on the undirected graph, the model searches all possible paths between all domains in the topology, and checks the quintuple consistency by using a classifying algorithm. The experiments in campus network demonstrate that this model can effectively detect the conflicts of policy globally in the distributed network and ensure the consistency of the network security policies.