Automating the configuration of firewalls and channel protection systems in virtual networks

Network virtualization has revolutionized the traditional approaches for security configuration. If in the past error-prone and unoptimized manual operations were performed by human beings, nowadays automated methodologies are employed for establishing the configuration of virtual security functions that can enforce the requested security properties. However, these techniques can only perform the automatic configuration of a single function type at a time. This restriction may be excessively limiting, because the configuration of some functions may directly impact others, and they cannot be configured in sequence. In light of these considerations, the paper investigates the stated problem for the two most commonly used security functions, packet filtering firewalls and channel protection systems. It also proposes a preliminary approach to automatically perform their joint intent-based configuration, by defining the problem through a Maximum Satisfiability Modulo Theories formulation.