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Section: Research Program
Functional areas
Security management
Securing the management plane is vital. While several proposals are already integrated in the existing management frameworks, they are rarely used. This is due to the fact that these approaches are completely detached from the enterprise security framework. As a consequence, the management framework is “managed” separately with different models; this represents a huge overhead. Moreover the current approaches to security in the management plane are not inter-operable at all, multiplying the operational costs in a heterogeneous management framework.
The primary goal of the research in this activity is the design and the validation of a security framework for the management plane that will be open and capable to integrate the security services provided in today's management architectures. Management security interoperability is of major importance in this activity.
Our activity in this area aims at designing a generic security model in the context of multi-party / multi-technology management interactions. Therefore, we develop research on the following directions:
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Abstraction of the various access control mechanisms that exist in today's management frameworks. We are particularly interested in extending these models so that they support event-driven management, which is not the case for most of them today.
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Extension of policy and trust models to ease and to ensure coordination among managers towards one agent or a subset of the management tree. Provisional policies are of great interest to us in this context.
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Evaluation of the adequacy of key distribution architectures to the needs of the management plane as well as selecting reputation models to be used in the management of highly dynamic environments (e.g. multicast groups, ad-hoc networks).
A strong requirement towards the future generic model is that it needs to be instantiated (with potential restrictions) into standard management platforms like SNMP, WBEM or Netconf and to allow interoperability in environments where these approaches coexist and even cooperate. A typical example of this is the security of an integration agent which is located in two management worlds.
Since 2006 we have also started an activity on security assessment. The objective is to investigate new methods and models for validating the security of large scale dynamic networks and services. The first targeted service is VoIP.
Configuration: automation of service configuration and provisioning
Configuration covers many processes which are all important to enable dynamic networks. Within our research activity, we focus on the operation of tuning the parameters of a service in an automated way. This is done together with the activation topics of configuration management and the monitoring information collected from the underlying infrastructure. Some approaches exist today to automate part of the configuration process (download of a configuration file at boot time within a router, on demand code deployment in service platforms). While these approaches are interesting they all suffer from the same limits, namely:
These two basic limits have high impacts on service dynamics in a heterogeneous environment.
We follow two research directions in the topic of configuration management. The first one aims at establishing an abstract life-cycle model for either a service, a device or a network configuration and to associate with this model a generic command and programming interface. This is done in a way similar to what is proposed in the area of call control in initiatives such as Parlay or OSA.
In addition to the investigation of the life-cycle model, we work on technology support for distributing and exchanging configuration management information. Especially, we investigate policy-driven approaches for representing configurations and constraints while we study XML-based protocols for coordinating distribution and synchronization. Off and online validation of configuration data is also part of this effort.
Performance and availability monitoring
Performance management is one of the most important and deployed management function. It is crucial for any service which is bound to an agreement about the expected delivery level. Performance management needs models, metrics, associated instrumentation, data collection and aggregation infrastructures and advanced data analysis algorithms.
Today, a programmable approach for end-to-end service performance measurement in a client server environment exists. This approach, called Application Response Measurement (ARM) defines a model including an abstract definition of a unit of work and related performance records; it offers an API to application developers which allows easy integration of measurement within their distributed application. While this approach is interesting, it is only a first step toward the automation of performance management.
We are investigating two specific aspects. First we are working on the coupling and possible automation of performance measurement models with the upper service level agreement and specification levels. Second we are working on the mapping of these high level requirements to the lower level of instrumentation and actual data collection processes available in the network. More specifically we are interested in providing automated mapping of service level parameters to monitoring and measurement capabilities. We also envision automated deployment and/or activation of performance measurement sensors based on the mapped parameters. This activity also incorporates self-instrumentation (and when possible on the fly instrumentation) of software components for performance monitoring purpose.