RESTful API
                 SUPA or I2NSF Policy Management
                               ^
 Northbound                    |
 Security Policy Interface     |
 (Independent of individual    |
  NSFs, devices, and vendors)  |
                               |
                 ------------------------------
                |                              |
                |  Security Policy Controller  |
                |                              |
                 ------------------------------
                      |                 ^
 Southbound Security  |   I2NSF         |
 Capability Interface |   NSF-facing    |
 (Specific to NSFs)   |   Interface     |
                  ..............................
                      |                 |
                      v                 |
                 ------------------------------
                |                              |
                |      I2NSF Proxy Agent /     |
                |      Management System       |
                |                              |
                 ------------------------------
                      |                 ^
                      |  Proprietary    |
                      |  Functional     |
                      |  Interface      |
                  ..............................
                      |                 |
                      v                 |

                -------------     -------------
               |             |---|             |
               |     NSF     |   |     NSF     |
     NSFs      |             |   |             |
 (virtual       -------------\   /-------------
    and               |       \ /       |
 physical)            |        X        |
                      |       / \       |
                -------------/   \-------------
               |             |---|             |
               |     NSF     |   |     NSF     |
               |             |   |             |
                -------------     -------------
                      
                    

Figure 2: Deployment with Management System or I2NSF Proxy Agent

There are two different deployment models:

1. Management without an explicit management system for control of devices and NSFs. In this deployment, the security policy controller acts as a NSF policy management system that takes information passed over the northbound policy interface and translates into data on the I2NSF southbound interface. The I2NSF interfaces are implemented by security device/function vendors. This would usually be done by having an I2NSF agent embedded in the security device or NSF. This deployment model is shown in Figure 1.
2. Management with an explicit management system for control of devices and NSFs. This model is similar to the model above except that security policy controller interacts with a dedicated management system which could either proxy I2NSF southbound interfaces or could provide a layer where security devices or NSFs do not support an I2NSF agent to process I2NSF southbound interfaces. This deployment model is shown in Figure 2.

Although the deployment models discussed here don't necessarily affect the northbound security policy interface, they do give an overall context for defining a security policy interface based on abstraction.

3.2. Client Perspective on Security Policy Configuration and Management

In order to provide I2NSF northbound interface for security policies to client that are not specific to any vendor, device or feature implementation, it is important that security policies shall be configured and managed from a client's perspective. We refer to this as the user-intent based model since it is primarily driven by how security administrators view security policies from the deployment perspective.

The client perspective ensures that policy management is not only easy to understand for them (the actual users), but is also independent of vendor, device, and specific implementation which is the foremost goal for a northbound interface.

4. Functional Requirements for the Northbound Interface

As mentioned earlier, it is important that the northbound interface be primarily driven by user-intent which is what a client understands well. In order to define this interface, we must understand the requirements and framework used by the security administrator.

A security policy that is based on user-intent is completely agnostic of how this policy is enforced in the end-customer's network. The security controller may choose to implement such a policy on any device (router, switch, firewall) in a physical or virtual form factor. The security policy controller's implementation is outside the scope of this document and the I2NSF working group.

At a high level, the objects that are required in order to express and build the security policies fall into the following categories:

• Multi-tenancy and RBAC for policy management
• Policy lifecycle management
• Policy endpoint groups
• Policy rules
• Policy actions
• Third party integration
• Telemetry data

The above categories are by no means a complete list and may not be sufficient for all use-cases and all end-customers, but should be a good start for a wide variety of use-cases in both Service Provider networks and Enterprise networks.

The following sections provide further details on the above mentioned security policies categories.

4.1. Multi-Tenancy and RBAC for Policy Management

An end-customer that uses security policies may have internal tenants and would like to have a framework wherein each tenant manages its own security policies to provide isolation across different tenants.

An end-customer may be a cloud service provider with multi-tenant deployments where each tenant is a different organization and must allow complete isolation across different tenants.

The RBAC objects and method needed to build such a framework is defined below.

Policy-Tenant:

An entity that owns and manages the security policies.

Policy-User:

A user within a Policy-Tenant authorized to manage security policies for that tenant.

Policy-Authorization-Role:

A role assigned to a Policy-User that determines whether the user has read-write access, read-only access, or no access for certain resources.

Authentication and Authorization Scheme:

There must be a scheme for a Policy-User to be authenticated and authorized to use the policy controller.

4.2. Policy Lifecycle Management

In order to provide more sophisticated security framework, there should be a mechanism to express that a policy becomes dynamically active/enforced or inactive based on either security administrator intervention or an event.

One example of dynamic policy management is when the security administrator pre-configures all the security policies, but the policies get activated/enforced or deactivated based on dynamic threats faced by the end-customer. Basically, a threat event may activate certain inactive policies, and once a new event indicates that the threat has gone away, the policies become inactive again.

The northbound interface should support the following mechanisms for policy enforcement:

Admin-Enforced:

The policy, once configured, remains active/enforced until removed by the security administrator.

Time-Enforced:

The policy configuration specifies the time profile that determines when policy is activated/enforced.

Event-Enforced:

The policy configuration specifies the event profile that determines when policy is activated/enforced.

4.3. Policy Endpoint Groups

Typically, when the security administrator configures a security policy, the intention is to apply this policy to certain subsets of the network. The subsets may be identified based on criteria such as users, devices, and applications. We refer to such a subset of the network as a "Policy Endpoint Group".

One of the biggest challenges for a security administrator is how to make sure that security policies remain effective while constant changes are happening to the "Policy Endpoint Group" for various reasons (e.g., organizational changes). If the policy is created based on static information such as user names, application, or network subnets, then every time that this static information changes policies would need to be updated. For example, if a policy is created that allows access to an application only from the group of Human Resource users (the HR-users group), then each time the HR-users group changes, the policy needs to be updated.

Changes to policy could be highly taxing to the end-customer for various operational reasons. The policy management framework must allow "Policy Endpoint Group" to be dynamic in nature so that changes to the group (HR-users in our example) automatically result in updates to its content.

We call these dynamic Policy Endpoint Groups "Meta-data Driven Groups". The meta-data is a tag associated with endpoint information such as users, applications, and devices. The mapping from meta-data to dynamic content could come either from standards-based or proprietary tools. The security controller could use any available mechanisms to derive this mapping and to make automatic updates to the policy content if the mapping information changes.

The northbound policy interface must support endpoint groups for user-intent based policy management. The following meta-data driven groups are typically used for configuring security polices:

User-Group:

This group identifies a set of users based on a tag or on static information. The tag to user information is dynamically derived from systems such as Active Directory or LDAP. For example, an end-customer may have different user-groups, such as HR-users, Finance-users, Engineering-users, to classify a set of users in each department.

Device-Group:

This group identifies a set of devices based on a tag or on static information. The tag to device information is dynamically derived from systems such as CMDB. For example, an end-customer may want to classify all machines running one operating system into one group and machines running another operating system into another group.

Application-Group:

This group identifies a set of applications based on a tag or on static information. The tag to application information is dynamically derived from systems such as CMDB. For example, an end-customer may want to classify all applications running in the Legal department into one group and all applications running under a specific operating system into another group.

Location-Group:

This group identifies a set of locations based on a tag or on static information. The tag to location information is dynamically derived from systems such as CMDB. For example, an end-customer may want to classify all sites/locations in a geographic region as one group.

4.4. Policy Rules

The security policy rules can be as simple as specifying a match for the user or application specified through "Policy Endpoint Group" and take one of the "Policy Actions" or more complicated rules that specify how two different "Policy Endpoint Groups" interact with each other. The northbound interface must support mechanisms to allow the following rule matches.

Policy Endpoint Groups: The rule must allow a way to match either a single or a member of a list of "Policy Endpoint Groups".

There must also be a way to express whether a group is a source or a destination so that the security administrator can apply the rule in only one direction of a communication.

There must also be a way to express a match between two "Policy Endpoint Groups" so that a policy can be effective for communication between two groups.

Direction:

The rule must allow a way to express whether the security administrator wants to match the "Policy Endpoint Group" as the source or destination. The default should be to match both directions if the direction rule is not specified in the policy.

Threats:

The rule should allow the security administrator to express a match for threats that come either in the form of feeds (such as botnet feeds, GeoIP feeds, URL feeds, or feeds from a SIEM) or speciality security appliances.

The threat could be from malware and this requires a way to match for virus signatures or file hashes.

4.5. Policy Actions

The security administrator must be able to configure a variety of actions within a security policy. Typically, security policy specifies a simple action of "deny" or "permit" if a particular rule is matched. Although this may be enough for most of the simple policies, the I2NSF northbound interface must also provide a more comprehensive set of actions so that the interface can be used effectively across various security functions.

Permit:

This action means continue processing the next rule or allow the packet to pass if this is the last rule.

Deny:

This action means stop further rule processing and drop the packet.

Drop connection:

This action means stop further rule processing, drop the packet, and drop connection (for example, by sending a TCP reset).

Log:

This action means create a log entry whenever a rule is matched.

Authenticate connection:

This action means that whenever a new connection is established it should be authenticated.

Quarantine/Redirect:

This action may be relevant for event driven policy where certain events would activate a configured policy that quarantines or redirects certain packet flows.

4.6. Third-Party Integration

The security policies in the end-customer's network may require the use of specialty devices such as honeypots, behavioral analytics, or SIEM in the network, and may also involve threat feeds, virus signatures, and malicious file hashes as part of comprehensive security policies.

The northbound interface must allow the security administrator to configure these threat sources and any other information to provide integration and fold this into policy management.

4.7. Telemetry Data

One of the most important aspect of security is to have visibility into the networks. As threats become more sophisticated, the security administrator must be able to gather different types of telemetry data from various devices in the network. The collected data could simply be logged or sent to security analysis engines for behavioral analysis and for threat detection.

The northbound interface must allow the security administrator to collect various kinds of data from NSFs. The data source could be syslog, flow records, policy violation records, and other available data.

5. Operational Requirements for the Northbound Interface

5.1. API Version

The northbound interface must support a version number for each RESTful API. This is very important because the client application and the controller application will most likely come from different vendors. Even if the vendor is same, it is hard to imagine that two different applications would be released in lock step.

Without API versioning, it hard to debug and figure out issues if application breaks. Although API versioning does not guarantee that applications will always work, it helps in debugging if the problem is caused by an API mismatch.

5.2. API Extensiblity

Abstraction and standardization of the northbound interface is of tremendous value to end-customers as it gives them the flexibility of deploying any vendors' NSF. However this might also look like as an obstacle to innovation.

If an NSF vendor comes up with new feature or functionality that can't be expressed through the currently defined northbound interface, there must be a way to extend existing APIs or to create a new API that is relevant for that NSF vendor only.

6. IANA Considerations

This document requires no IANA actions. RFC Editor: Please remove this section before publication.

7. Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank Adrian Farrel for helpful discussions and advice.

8. Normative References

[I-D.ietf-i2nsf-problem-and-use-cases]

Hares, S., Dunbar, L., Lopez, D., Zarny, M. and C. Jacquenet, "I2NSF Problem Statement and Use cases", Internet-Draft draft-ietf-i2nsf-problem-and-use-cases-00, February 2016.

Authors' Addresses