NSF Workshop on Assurable and Usable Security Configuration

Presenter
Patrick McDaniel, Penn State University and Shubho Sen, AT&T

Time
Session III - 1:30am - 3:00pm

Abstract
The development and maintenance of network device configurations is one of the central technical and logistical challenges faced by network providers.  Current network management systems fail to meet this challenge primarily because of their inability to adapt to rapidly evolving customer and provider-network needs, and because of mismatches between the conceptual models of the tools and the services they must support.  In this talk, I present the PRESTO configuration management system that attempts to address these failings in a comprehensive and flexible way.  Developed for and used during the last 5 years within a large ISP network, PRESTO constructs device-native configurations based on the composition of configlets representing different services or service options. Configlets are compiled by extracting and manipulating data from external systems as directed by the PRESTO configuration scripting and template language.  I outline the configuration management needs of large-scale network providers, introduce the PRESTO system and configuration language, and reflect upon our experiences developing a PRESTO configured VPN service.

Presentation
Download (PDF, 532 kb)