Configuring storage-area networks using mandatory security

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Aziz, Benjamin^{a; *} | Foley, Simon N.^b | Herbert, John^b | Swart, Garret^c

Affiliations: [a] e-Science Centre, Science and Technology Facilities Council, Didcot OX11 0QX, UK. E-mail: b.aziz@rl.ac.uk | [b] Department of Computer Science, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland. E-mails: s.foley@cs.ucc.ie, herbert@cs.ucc.ie | [c] Oracle Corporation, Redwood Shores, CA 94065, USA. E-mail: garret.swart@oracle.com

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 1235 778840; Fax: +44 1235 445945.

Abstract: Storage-area networks are a popular and efficient way of building large storage systems both in an enterprise environment and for multi-domain storage service providers. In both environments the network and the storage has to be configured to ensure that the data is maintained securely and can be delivered efficiently. In this paper, we describe a model of mandatory security for SAN services that incorporates the notion of risk as a measure of the robustness of the SAN's configuration and that formally defines a vulnerability common in systems with mandatory security, i.e. cascaded threats. Our abstract SAN model is flexible enough to reflect the data requirements, tractable for the administrator, and can be implemented as part of an automatic configuration system. The implementation is given as part of a prototype written in OPL.

Keywords: Storage-area networks (SAN), formal validation methods, security, configuration analysis

DOI: 10.3233/JCS-2009-0337

Journal: Journal of Computer Security, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 191-210, 2009