Principles of Secure Network Configuration: Towards a Formal Basis for Self-Configuration

The challenge for autonomic network management is the provision of future network management systems that have the charac- teristics of self-management, self-configuration, self-protection and self- healing, in accordance with the high level objectives of the enterprise or human end-user. This paper proposes an abstract model for network configuration that is intended to help understand fundamental under- lying issues in self-configuration. We describe the cascade problem in self-configuring networks: when individual network components that are securely configured are connected together (in an apparently secure man- ner), a configuration cascade can occur resulting in a mis-configured net- work. This has implications for the design of self-configuring systems and we discuss how a soft constraint-based framework can provide a solution.