Automatic enforcement of location aware user based network access control policies

Abstract

Multiple interconnected network segments distributed across various locations, such as corporate networks, where users or employees constantly travel among segments and require to access servers, need to have network access control mechanisms that are able to adapt to these location changes. The idea of a firewall changing or adapting its rules depending on the location of users is presented by an architecture in this paper. This architecture proposes deployment of a policy server at the management level and policy agents at the firewall level, so that policy-driven network security management is enabled by specifying location aware user based network access control policies at the network security management and enforcing them at the managed firewalls. The architecture presented in this paper utilizes user VPN connection event triggers for dynamic policy configuration and automated policy deployment to firewalls. Location aware user based network access control policies, which are management level policies, are implemented using XACML. A network level policy is usually a configuration, or policy, file local to the firewall. The policy agent incorporated into the firewall performs the mapping from management level policy to firewall policy.