Toward Assurable and Robust Network Security Configurations: Optimizing Security and Usability
Speaker: Ehab Al-Shaer, School of Computer Science, DePaul University
Wednesday July 9, 2008, 3pm-5pm in 111 Cummington Street, Room 135
Abstract: The assurability of network security is dependent not only on protocols and algorithms but also on the configuration that determines the behavior of network security devices. Network devices such as routers, Firewalls, IPSec gateways, and Intrusion Detection/Prevention Systems operate based on locally configured policies. Yet these policies are not necessarily independent as they interact with each other to form global end-to-end security goals. As a typical enterprise network would include hundreds of network devices and thousands of configuration variables and rules, configuring these policies correctly and consistently across the network become an intractable task. It has been widely reported that misconfiguration is a major cause of network unreachability and vulnerability problems. Moreover, security configuration must be dynamically tuned to optimize security, usability and, performance. This process is extremely burdening to even experienced administrators.
This talk will present our research work to address these challenges in the area of automated verification and optimization of global network security configuration. I will present our approach to detect global conflicts in security configurations and optimize policies based on traffic statistics.
We will also present our future work to measure quality of protection objectively and tune security configuration dynamically to optimize security.
Biography: Ehab Al-Shaer is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Security & Multimedia Networking Research Lab (SMNLAB) in the School of Computer Science, Telecommunications and Information System at DePaul University. His primary research areas are network security, fault management, and multimedia protocols. Prof. Al-Shaer co-edited 6 books and published more than 80 refereed journal and paper articles in his area.
Prof. Al-Shaer has served as a Program Co-chair for number of conferences in his research area such as NSF Workshop on Assurable and Usable Security Configuration (August 2008), Automated Network Management (ANM-INFOCOM 2008), IEEE POLICY 2008, Integrated Management (IM 2007), E2EMON 2004-2005, and MMNS 2001. He is also the General Chair of ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security (CCS 2009-2010).
Prof. Al-Shaer has also served as TPC member, session chair, workshop chair, and tutorial presenter for many IEEE/ACM/IFIP conferences in his area. He received number of Best Paper Awards, and fellowship awards from IEEE, NASA and USENIX. Prof. Al-Shaer has received research funding from NSF, Cisco, Intel, Sun Microsystems and Aprisma.
Host: Mark Crovella