Centralized management of virtual security zones in IP networks

Abstract

The growing security awareness among business users of networks based on Internet Protocol has emerged a need to control the security policies of the network nodes. The nodes can be distributed all over the Internet. The node configuration that is used to enforce the security policy is typically set by hand which is time consuming and error prone. Thus there is a need for centralized management system of the security policies of the nodes. In this paper we suggest that the roles of network and security administrators should be separated. We have designed a system for centralized security policy management and made a prototype implementation of it. With our system we can control security policies of the nodes securely and remotely from a centralized management node. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.