21st Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC'05)
Generating Policies for Defense in Depth
Tucson, Arizona
December 05-December 09
ISBN: 0-7695-2461-3
Coordinating multiple overlapping defense mechanisms, at differing levels of abstraction, is fraught with the potential for misconfiguration, so there is strong motivation to generate policies for those mechanisms from a single specification in order to avoid that risk. This paper presents our experience and the lessons learned as we developed, validated and coordinated network communication security policies for a defensein- depth enabled system that withstood sustained red team attack. Network communication was mediated by host-based firewalls, process domain mechanisms and application-level security policies enforced by the Java Virtual Machine. We coordinated the policies across the layers using a variety of tools, but we discovered that, at least for defense-in-depth enabled systems, constructing a single specification from which to derive all policies is probably neither practical nor even desirable.
Citation:
Paul Rubel, Michael Ihde, Steven Harp, Charles Payne, "Generating Policies for Defense in Depth," acsac, pp.505-514, 21st Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC'05), 2005