loading page

Continuous Verification of Network Security Compliance
  • +1
  • Claas Lorenz ,
  • Vera Clemens ,
  • Max Schrötter ,
  • Bettina Schnor
Claas Lorenz
University of Potsdam, University of Potsdam

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

Author Profile
Vera Clemens
Author Profile
Max Schrötter
Author Profile
Bettina Schnor
Author Profile

Abstract

Continuous verification of network security compliance is an accepted need. Especially, the analysis of stateful packet filters plays a central role for network security in practice. But the few existing tools which support the analysis of stateful packet filters show runtimes in the order of minutes to hours making them unsuitable for continuous compliance verification.
In this work, we address these challenges and present a solution which is based on the application of formal methods. First, we introduce the formal language FPL that enables a high-level human-understandable specification of the desired state of network security. Second, we demonstrate the instantiation of a compliance process using a verification framework that analyzes the configuration of complex networks and devices - including stateful firewalls - for compliance with FPL policies. Our evaluation results show the scalability of the presented approach for the well known Internet2 and Stanford benchmarks as well as for large firewall rule sets where it outscales state-of-the-art tools by a factor of over 41.
Jun 2022Published in IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management volume 19 issue 2 on pages 1729-1745. 10.1109/TNSM.2021.3130290