A model transformation based security policy automatic management framework for software-defined networking

Software-defined networking (SDN) has been utilized to enforce the security of traditional networks. However, the existing SDN-based security enforcement mechanisms rely heavily on the security policies containing the underlying information of data plane, such as MAC address, IP address or switch ports. These security policies need to be specifically developed by network operators and loaded into the control plane manually. With increasing the scale of underlying network, the existing security policy management mechanisms confront more and more challenges. The security policy transformation for SDN networks is to research how to transform the high-level security policy without containing the underlying information into the practical flow entries used by Openflow switches automatically, thereby implementing the automatic management of security policies. To achieve this objective, we propose a model transformation based security policy automatic management framework for software-defined networking in this paper. Leveraging its functional modules, the framework can solve the problems of how to find a connected path for each access control rule of security policy model (SPM) in data plane, how to transform the connected path into the system model of flow entries, as well as how to generate the practical flow entries according to the system model of flow entries. In order to validate the effectiveness and performance of framework, we implement the framework by leveraging POX controller and Mininet emulator. The experimental results illustrate the framework can transform SPM into practical flow entries, synchronously perceive the modifications caused by cutting down one connected path or changing SPM, and continuously keep the data plane holding the security properties defined by SPM at runtime.