Simplifying Network Management With Lockdown

The administrator of an enterprise network has a responsibility to enforce the policies on the network. Yet, most security mechanisms do not map well to the intended policies. This has been due to the prevalence of simplistic tools that have poor enforcement but, yet are easy to manage. While advanced commercial solutions do exist that have stronger enforcement, they are significantly harder to manage. To that end, the authors propose Lockdown, a policy-oriented security approach that builds on the concept of local context to deliver a lighter weight approach to enterprise network security while striking a balance between the level of enforcement and level of management available to the network administrator.