Network management

About: Network management is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 17859 publications have been published within this topic receiving 234520 citations. The topic is also known as: computer network management & NM.

A security architecture for survivability mechanisms

Abstract: In survivability management systems, some management entities reside on application hosts that are not necessarily trustworthy. The integrity of these software entities is essential to the security of the network management scheme. In this talk, I present a novel framework to facilitate software security against malicious execution environments. The approach consists of two fundamental techniques: (a) Incorporating diversity in the deployment and the design of the program such that impersonation or intelligent tampering attacks require extensive analysis of the program; and (b) one important aspect of program analysis, namely static analysis, is deterred by the incorporation of aliasing and further degeneration of the program control flow. It is shown that analyzing the transformed programs statically is an NP-hard problem. Theoretic bounds on approximate analysis methods are also provided. The transformations are implemented in a C compiler. Program performance results are presented. Empirical experiments with existing analysis tools showed that static analysis for the transformed programs are hindered to a significant degree.

Toward adaptive and scalable openflow-SDN flow control: A survey

Abstract: Software-defined networking (SDN) is an emerging network architecture that promises to simplify network management, improve network resource utilization, and boost evolution and innovation in traditional networks. The SDN allows the abstraction and centralized management of the lower-level network functionalities by decoupling the network logic from the data forwarding devices into the logically centralized distributed controllers. However, this separation introduces new scalability and performance challenges in large-scale networks of dynamic traffic and topology conditions. Many research studies have represented that centralization and maintaining the global network visibility over the distributed SDN controller introduce scalability concern. This paper surveys the state-of-the-art proposed techniques toward minimizing the control to data planes communication overhead and controllers' consistency traffic to enhance the OpenFlow-SDN scalability in the context of logically centralized distributed SDN control plane architecture. The survey mainly focuses on four issues, including logically centralized visibility, link-state discovery, flow rules placement, and controllers' load balancing. In addition, this paper discusses each issue and presents an updated and detailed study of existing solutions and limitations in enhancing the OpenFlow-SDN scalability and performance. Moreover, it outlines the potential challenges that need to be addressed further in obtaining adaptive and scalable OpenFlow-SDN flow control.

The OSU Flow-tools Package and CISCO NetFlow Logs

Abstract: Many Cisco routers and switches support NetFlow services which provides a detailed source of data about network traffic. The Office of Information Technology Enterprise Networking Services group (OIT/ENS) at The Ohio State University (OSU) has written a suite of tools called flow-tools to record, filter, print and analyze flow logs derived from exports of NetFlow accounting records. We use the flow logs for general network planning, performance monitoring, usage based billing, and many security related tasks including incident response and intrusion detection. This paper describes what the flow logs contain, the tools we have written to store and process these logs, and discusses how we have used the logs and the tools to perform network management and security functions at OSU. We also discuss some related projects and our future plans at the end of the paper.

Systems and methods for automatically generating system restoration order for network recovery

Abstract: Embodiments relate to systems and methods for automatically generating a system restoration order for network recovery. A set of managed machines, such as personal computers or servers, can be managed by a network management platform communicating with the machines via a secure channel. The network management platform can access a dependency map indicating a required order for restoration of machines or nodes on a network. The network management platform likewise access a reverse kickstart file for each machine to be automatically restored in order to ensure proper functioning of the network, and extract a current configuration of that machine for purposes of restoring the overall network.

System and method for consolidating, securing and automating out-of-band access to nodes in a data network

Abstract: A system and method for out-of-band network management (28) is provided wherein one or more different management interfaces (30) are converted into a common format management. The system may encrypt the common format management data. The system may also authenticate each user (22) that attempts to access the management interfaces (30).