Managing heterogeneous network environments using an extensible policy framework

Security policy management is critical to meet organizational needs and reduce potential risks because almost every organization depends on computer networks and the Internet for their daily operations. It is therefore important to specify and enforce security policies effectively. However, as organizations grow, so do their networks increasing the difficulty of deploying a security policy, especially across heterogeneous systems. In this paper, we introduce a policy framework called Chameleos-x which is designed to enforce security policies consistently across security-aware systems with network services-primarily operating systems, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems. Throughout this paper, we focus on the design and architecture of Chameleos-x and demonstrate how our policy framework helps organizations implement security policies in changing, diversity-rich environments. We also describe our experimentation of Chameleos-x to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.