Automated Security Policy Management

  

The assurance of network security is dependent not only on the protocols
but also on polices that determine the functional behavior of network
security devices. Network security devices such as Firewalls, IPSec
gateways, IDS/IPS operate based on locally configured access control
policies. However, the complexity of managing security polices,
particularly in enterprise networks, poses many challenges for deploying
effective security. For example, security policies are usually configured
in isolation from each other, even though they are not necessarily
independent as they interact with each other to form the global security
policy. As a result of such ad-hoc management, policy inconsistencies and
network vulnerability are created.  In addition security policy might
grow in size causing a significant performance overhead in security
devices.

 

In this talk, we will try to address these challenges by presenting our
recent research results in the area of automated verification, and
optimization of network security polices.

 

Bio

      Ehab Al-Shaer is an Associate Professor and the Director of the
      Multimedia Networking Research Lab (MNLAB) in the School of
      Computer Science, Telecommunications and Information Systems at
      DePaul University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science, M.S.
      in Computer Science University, and B.S. in Computer Engineering
      from Old Dominion University (USA), Northeastern University (USA)
      and KFUPM (Saudi Arabia) in 1998, 1994, and 1990 respectively. His
      primary research areas are network security, Internet monitoring,
      fault management, and multimedia transport protocols. Prof.
      Al-Shaer was a Co-Editor for number of books in the area of
      Multimedia Networking and Internet Monitoring and he was also a
      guest editor for number of journals special issues. Prof. Al-Shaer
      is/was Technical Program Chair for IEEE IM 2007, MMNS 2001, and
      E2EMON 2002-2005. He has many refereed publications in
      well-established journals and conferences in his area. Prof.
      Al-Shaer was an invited speaker, tutorial presenter and panelist,
      steering committee member and program committee member in many
      major conferences in his area. He was awarded the Best Paper Award
      in IM'03, MMNS'04 and he was awarded NASA fellowship in 1997.