Generating policies for defense in depth

Abstract

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 defense-in-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