Chapter: Policy based management

From Computing Project Repository

Arosha Bandara, Emil Lupu and Morris Sloman Department of Computing, Imperial College London, 180 Queensgate, London SW7 2AZ {a.k.bandara, e.c.lupu, m.sloman}@imperial.ac.uk

Abstract: Policies are rules governing the choices in behaviour of a system. They are often used as a means of implementing flexible and adaptive systems for management of internet services, distributed systems, and security systems. There is also a need for a common specification of security policy for large-scale, multiorganisational systems where access control is implemented in a variety of heterogeneous components. In this chapter we survey both security and management policy specification approaches. We also cover the issues relating to detecting and resolving conflicts which can arise in the policies and approaches for refining high level goals and service level agreements into implementable policies. The chapter briefly outlines some of the research issues that have to be solved for large-scale adoption of policy-based systems

Topics Covered:

1. Overview Introduction to policy based management, concepts and terminology: what is policy, the different types of policy etc; policy components and policy organisation. Present some example scenarios that can be used as motivating examples to show how policies would be used to provide security, trust and management functionality.

2. General Aspects and Architecture Describe the common features of policy based management systems and describe an architecture for specification, deployment and enforcement of policies.

3. Policies for Security and Trust specification Discuss the requirements of security and trust specification and show how policy based management can be applied in this context. Provide an overview of the various research results that provide security and trust functionality using policies. Use the examples presented in the overview to illustrate the capabilities and limitations of the various approaches.

4. Policies for Management and Control of Networks and Distributed Systems Use the examples presented in the Overview, to describe the requi rements when using policies to manage networks and distributed systems. Present the existing approaches to meeting these requirements and use the examples to show how they can be used.

5. Ponder Policy Framework The Ponder framework provides a language for specifying both security and management policy in a declarative form. This section will describe this framework and provide examples of how it can be used in each application domain.

6. Tool Support for Policy Based Management Present a summary of the toolkits developed in academia and industry for policy-based management. Examples include, KaOS (IHMC, Florida), Ponder (Imperial), IBM Tivoli, Cisco Assure, HP Openview etc.

7. Policy Analysis and Refinement Present the problems associated with analysis and refinement of policies, and provide an overview of the work being done to address these challenges.

8. Summary and Conclusions