Towards Policy Enforcement Point as a Service (PEPS)
This addresses access control limitations for organizations by enabling distributed and cooperative security services, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing SDN concepts.
The paper introduces Policy Enforcement as a Service (PEPS) to enable inter-layer and inter-domain access control using a Software-Defined Network architecture, allowing defense-in-depth protection and dropping unsuccessful requests before reaching data providers.
In this paper, we coin the term Policy Enforcement as a Service (PEPS), which enables the provision of innovative inter-layer and inter-domain Access Control. We leverage the architecture of Software-Defined-Network (SDN) to introduce a common network-level enforcement point, which is made available to a range of access control systems. With our PEPS model, it is possible to have a `defense in depth' protection model and drop unsuccessful access requests before engaging the data provider (e.g. a database system). Moreover, the current implementation of access control within the `trusted' perimeter of an organization is no longer a restriction so that the potential for novel, distributed and cooperative security services can be realized. We conduct an analysis of the security requirements and technical challenges for implementing Policy Enforcement as a Service. To illustrate the benefits of our proposal in practice, we include a report on our prototype PEPS-enabled location-based access control.