EAGER: A Logic-Based Security Framework for Wired and Mobile Perimeter

University Of Missouri-Kansas City, Columbia MO

Investigators

Abstract

Mobile (wireless) communication has become an essential information exchange platform for today's enterprise and government organizations. They need to secure mobile devices as they secure wired devices. Today, it is common for these organizations to have multiple external mobile and wireless connections to the outside world to provide high bandwidth and tolerate connection failures. One way to protect the network perimeter is to use border gateways that impose a uniform static policy on network traffic (wired and wireless) entering through its borders and by installing effective security schemes and policies on mobile devices itself. While being simple, such a static policy has many disadvantages and may not provide necessary protection to mobile and wired perimeter. They are (a) unable to react to changes in its external environment, (b) they have physical limitations and differences in trust relationships, and (c) completeness among a non- communicating set of policies is problematic. Therefore, in order to provide perimeter protection policies that react to dynamic changes (quite frequent in mobile perimeter) and respect organizational objectives such as preferential treatment, yet enforce overall security objectives of organizations, requires that individual policies enforced at each border gateway be (a) dynamic and flexible, and (b) be a part of a global policy such that taken together enforce common security objectives in mobile infrastructure. In this proposal we achieve this by a logic-based security framework. Our solution has the potential to improve the security while reducing the management costs.