Scalable model‐based configuration management of security services in complex enterprise networks

Security administrators face the challenge of designing, deploying and maintaining a variety of configuration files related to security systems, especially in large‐scale networks. These files have heterogeneous syntaxes and follow differing semantic concepts. Nevertheless, they are interdependent due to security services having to cooperate and their configuration to be consistent with each other, so that global security policies are completely and correctly enforced. To tackle this problem, our approach supports a comfortable definition of an abstract high‐level security policy and provides an automated derivation of the desired configuration files. It is an extension of policy‐based management and policy hierarchies, combining model‐based management (MBM) with system modularization. MBM employs an object‐oriented model of the managed system to obtain the details needed for automated policy refinement. The modularization into abstract subsystems (ASs) segment the system—and the model—into units which more closely encapsulate related system components and provide focused abstract views. As a result, scalability is achieved and even comprehensive IT systems can be modelled in a unified manner. The associated tool MoBaSeC (Model‐Based‐Service‐Configuration) supports interactive graphical modelling, automated model analysis and policy refinement with the derivation of configuration files. We describe the MBM and AS approaches, outline the tool functions and exemplify their applications and results obtained. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.