A Flexible and Dynamic Access Control Policy Framework for an Active Networking Environment

To provide security for active networking nodes with respect to availability and controlled access the introduction of an access control mechanism and consequently a policy framework are mandatory. We follow the approach of a scenario-tailored runtime supervision of the service. During the development of the access control mechanism we strongly focused on keeping the mechanism as efficient as possible and to realize a modular design which allows to dynamically upgrade and configure the mechanism making use of the active networking technology itself while at the same time ensuring that mandatory security checks cannot be circumvented. Each service has to pass initial checks before it could be executed on an active node. Furthermore, also service-specific adaptive criterions could be included into the initial check. This paper presents the resulting flexible and dynamic access control policy framework. The approach considers the following aspects: service-specific supervision requirements, node-specific protection, extensibility in order to satisfy future security requirements and a dynamic reaction mechanism. The framework provides a mechanism for the authors of services to express the resource and authorization requirements of their services. Additionally, the network administrator is able to express its trust into a service and to configure the protection mechanisms of each active node in an individual way. Further on, the administrator is able to change the configuration of an active node at runtime and finally a reaction mechanism is integrated into the policy framework. The policy framework utilizes the possibilities provided by an active networking infrastructure. In this report we discuss the policy framework and we also present results achieved with a first prototype realized for the active networking environment AMnet.