Delegating network security with more information

Abstract

Network security is gravitating towards more centralized control. Strong centralization places a heavy burden on the administrator who has to manage complex security policies and be able to adapt to users' requests. To be able to cope, the administrator needs to delegate some control back to end-hosts and users, a capability that is missing in today's networks. Delegation makes administrators less of a bottleneck when policy needs to be modified and allows network administration to follow organizational lines. To enable delegation, we propose ident++ - a simple protocol to request additional information from end-hosts and networks on the path of a flow. ident++ allows users and end-hosts to participate in network security enforcement by providing information that the administrator might not have or rules to be enforced on their behalf. In this paper we describe ident++ and how it provides delegation and enables flexible and powerful policies. Copyright 2009 ACM.