Lockdown: Simplifying Enterprise Network Management with Local Context

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, we 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. In this paper, we describe how the Lockdown approach streamlines the process of network security management from network auditing to visualization to policy mapping to enforcement to validation. We demonstrate the strength of Lockdown through detailed assessments of an enterprise university network to show how local context significantly improves network management for the system administrator.