Security tunnels are a common networking technique in which a pair of nodes share state that enable them to apply efficient transformations to messages to ensure their security. There are interesting challenges in understanding how protocols to establish tunnels and policies about how to use them can serve as building blocks to achieve the security goals of network administrative domains. Such applications assume many properties from the policy state on gateways that go beyond the confidentiality and integrity guarantees of the tunnels themselves. The tunnel calculus is a formalism aimed at describing the configuration and enforcement of policy on network security gateways. It can be viewed as a formalization of security policies in IPsec, although it is not intended to model any specific version of IPsec precisely, but instead to provide a foundation for reasoning about the kinds of policy state that are needed for security gateway applications more   generally.

People

• Alwyn Goodloe (University of Pennsylvania)
• Carl A. Gunter (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
• Mark-Oliver Stehr (SRI)
• Gaurav Shah (University of Pennsylvania)
• Matthew Jacobs

Publications

• A Foundation for Tunnel-Complex Protocols,
  Alwyn E. Goodloe.
  Ph.D. Dissertation. Defended January 2008.
• Reasoning about Concurrency for Security Tunnels,
  Alwyn E. Goodloe and Carl A. Gunter.
  IEEE Computer Security Foundations (CSF 07), Venice, Italy, July 2007.
• Design Principles for Gateway Discovery Protocols,
  Alwyn Goodloe and Carl A. Gunter.
  Research paper manuscript, draft of November 2006.
• The Tunnel Calculus,
  Alwyn Goodloe and Carl A. Gunter.
  Research paper manuscript, draft of October 2006.
• Challenges for Gateway Discovery Protocols,
  Carl A. Gunter and Alwyn E. Goodloe.
  Position paper, May 2006.
• L3A: A Protocol for Layer Three Accounting,
  Alwyn Goodloe, Matthew Jacobs, Gaurav Shah and Carl A. Gunter.
  IEEE Workshop on Secure Network Protocols (NPsec '05), Boston, MA, 2005. [PPT]
• Formal Prototyping in Early Stages of Protocol Design
  Alwyn Goodloe, Carl A. Gunter, and Mark-Oliver Stehr
  IFIP Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems (WITS '05), Long Beach, CA, 2005.