Popeye - Using Fine-grained Network Access Control to Support Mobile Users and Protect Intranet Hosts

Popeye - Using Fine-grained Network Access Control to Support
Mobile Users and Protect Intranet Hosts
Mike Chen
mikechen@cs.berkeley.edu
Barbara Hohlt
hohltb@cs.berkeley.edu
Tal Lavian
tlavian@cs.berkeley.edu
11 December, 2000
Abstract
We are facing a trend towards ubiquitous connectiv-
ity where users demand access at anytime, anywhere.
This has lead to the deployment of public network
ports and wireless networks. Current solutions to
network access control are inflexible and only provide
all-or-nothing access.
It is also increasing important to protect Intranet
hosts from other mobile and static hosts on the same
Intranet, in order to contain damages in the case that
a host gets compromised.
We present an architecture that addresses these is-
sues by using a programmable router to provide dy-
namic fine-grained network access control. The Java-
enabled router dynamically generates and enforces
access control rules using policies and user profiles as
input, reducing administrative overhead. Our modu-
lar design integrates well with existing authentication
and directory servers, further reducing admininstra-
tive costs. Our prototype is implemented using Nor-
tel’s Accelar router and moves users to VLANs with
the appropriate access privilege.
1 Introduction
Many organizations, such as UC Berkeley, would like
to provide ubiquitous connectivity to its users as well
as visitors. In order to deploy such connectivity, ac-
cess control is required so that only authorized users
have access to network resources. If unauthorized
users gain access to the network, they could cause
damage by abusing resources or attacking machines
on the Intranet, they can also launch attacks against
systems outside the organization. Current solutions
to secure network access provide only all-or-nothing
access, and often have high administrative costs.
Network access control is more than just protecting
against unauthorized mobile hosts. Even static hosts
on an Intranet may pose as a security threat. Take
the recent Microsoft break-in [?] as an example:
a host on the Microsoft Intranet was compromised
through an email virus, then it was used to attack
other hosts on the Intranet. This attack exploits the
fact that most Intranet are fully reachable by all In-
tranet hosts1
. The damage of this type of break-in
would have been greatly reduced if a network access
control system were in place on every port within the
organisation to limit the networks that a host can
reach.
A fine-grained and flexible network access control sys-
tem with low administrative costs is clearly desirable,
but today’s solutions fall short in one or more areas.
The following are important properties that a net-
work access control system should have:
Flexible and fine-grained access control It should be
able to prevent source spoofing and support desti-
nation filtering. It should also support per-user and
per-application policies.
Modular design It is important to be able to integrate
well with existing services such as RADIUS and Ker-
beros for authentication and LDAP for user profiles.
Easy to manage Administrative cost is a major con-
cern in any organization. The access control policy
must be easy to specify and get right. Administra-
tors should be able to specify system-wide, group-
wide, and user-specific policies using some high level
language, and have the system configure the com-
ponents and enfore the policies automatically. To
further lower administrative cost, different modules
should be able to be managed by different adminis-
1Microsoft’s Intranet was manually partitioned so that
highly sensitive data such as source code was on a network
unreachable from the compromised host. This type of manual
partitioning is inflexible and does not support mobile hosts.
1

trators.
Support for mobile user It should dynamically con-
figure network ports to give the right network access
to the user.
High performance The access control system must be
able to scale up to support many users with little
performance impact.
Easy to use The system must be easy to use to be
adopted by users. It should present familiar UI to
the user and require little or no special software.
In this paper, we describe the design and implemen-
tation of Popeye, a network access control system.
In Section 2, we describe related work. In Section
3, we discuss the design principles and architecture
components. In Section 4, we discuss our prototype
implementation. In Section 5, we evaluate our sys-
tem using our design goals. In Section 6, we discuss
our initial results and future works. In Section 7, we
state our conclusions.
2 Related Work
SPINACH [8] provides access control on public net-
work ports to allow only authorized users onto
the network. Users authenticate themselves using
kerberos-enabled telnet. The SPINACH router fil-
ters everything except DHCP traffic (so all users can
get an IP address), SPINACH server traffic (so all
users can authenticate), and authorized user traffic.
SPINACH II [5] extends the work to use web-based
authentication. It is deployed in the CS department
of Stanford, and has been integrated with an existing
authentication server.
SPINACH II’s strengths are low cost, easy to use,
and modular design. However, it only providies all-
or-nothing network access control. A SPINACH user,
including visitors, either gets full access to the net-
work or no access at all. Second, SPINACH II fil-
ters packets based on MAC address which is prone
to MAC address spoofing attacks, especially on eth-
ernet networks where ARP reveals MAC addresses of
other hosts. As a result, SPINACH II is useful in set-
tings where network access control is necessary but
not critical. Third, SPINACH II is software based
and does not scale as well as hardware solutions.
Carnegie Melon’s AuthNet [9] is similar to SPINACH
in using MAC address filtering to allow only authen-
ticated user traffic onto the campus network. A user
registers his MAC address with a centralized server,
and the Cisco VLAN switch filters everything but the
packets with the registered MAC addresses. All “au-
thenticated” users appear on the same VLAN even
though they may be connected to different VLAN
switches. It also offers all-or-nothing access to the
network and suffers from the same MAC spoofing at-
tacks.
Carnegie Melon’s NetBar system [7] uses a Cisco Cat-
alyst VLAN switch to isolate all the public ports on a
“un-authenticated” VLAN with limited connectivity
to the authentication server and the DHCP server.
Once the user obtains an IP address through DHCP,
the user authenticate themselves using their Kerberos
password. Once authenticated, the server sends an
SNMP message to the VLAN switch to move the
port to a VLAN with full connectivity. When the
client disconnects from a port, the VLAN switch de-
tects the drop in link status, and moves the port back
to the “un-authenticated” VLAN. NetBar prevents
MAC address spoofing attacks but it also only pro-
vides all-or-nothing network access control.
InSite’s [6] design requires the use of NetBar VLANs
and custom software on the client. To support all
possible client platforms, administrators would need
to support multiple versions of the client software.
The administrative cost and support overhead of the
design makes it unrealistic for deployment.
UC Berkeley has proposed a design [10] that requires
special DHCP software on the clients, intelligent hubs
that can turn ports on and off, and a modified DHCP
server that only hands out configuration to authen-
ticated clients. The custom software requirement
makes it vulnerable to the same kinds of deployment
problem as InSite.
All five solutions discussed above offer all-or-nothing
access control, and they don’t offer protection be-
tween hosts on the Intranet. They may be suitable
for university campuses where secure network access
is not critical and the requirement is to reduce un-
authorized access to the network. For organizations
that need stronger access control, we prefer Popeye
to the Stanford, CMU, UCB, and U of Michigan de-
signs.
In the above related work the additional functionality
was done by software base routers. We can differen-
tiate our work by using the capabilities of hardware
base routing. This allows us have wire speed, fine
grain filtering, and scalability. Figure 1 shows the
separation of the control plane and forwarding plane
in hardware based routers. This is the difference of
combining forwarding and control in software based
2

Figure 1: Software-Based and Hardware-Based Rout-
ing
routing. In software based routing all packets are pro-
cessed by the main cpu. This puts some load on the
performance and the capabilities of previously related
work. Our approach results in enhancing the forward-
ing capabilities in about two orders of magnitude and
the number of ports in about one order of magnitude.
In our approach the filtering is done by the hardware
without additional load on the cpu. The cpu can be
idle while the router is doing the above work in wire
speed. This allows scalability and fine grain filtering
that was limited in previous work.
3 Design
This section describes the design of Popeye, a network
access control system. Popeye has a modular design
comprised of five components which are a mix of our
own Popeye services and existing services. Figure 2
illustrates the architecture with the five components;
Java Web Server, Policy Manager, Network Access
Manager, external Security services, and an external
DHCP server.
The overall design approach is to run our custom Pop-
eye services on a programmable router, and to run the
existing services on host machines. We choose a pro-
grammable router solution for its high performance
and the ability to do flexible, fine-grained access con-
trol. This includes access control at the IP, protocol
and applications layers. In our design, we assume
all ports are directly connected to a programmable
router.
For our design to be effective, it must be easy to use.
We want to allow a visitor network access, but at
the same time we want to protect the organisation’s
Intranet. Below we present a scenario which illustrate
Figure 2: Popeye Architecture
our expectations from a user’s perspective.
3.1 A Usage Scenario
A visitor comes to Berkely and wants to connect to
the network. He connects his machine to a physical
port or uses a wireless NIC card and gets an IP ad-
dress through DHCP. He then points his web browser
to a specific web site and is asked to enter a username
and password. Whereupon, the system gives him the
right permission to use the network. The type of per-
mission can be no access, access to the internet, or
access to certain security domains within the organi-
sation.
3.2 Web Server
Because it is a simple way to access our system, we
decided to use a web interface for the mobile clients.
However, as we will explain later, we need to pro-
tect the visitor’s IP address. The solution is to have
the web server run directly on the Accelar as an
HttpServlet. The Web Server validates the user with
the Authentication Server, records the physcial port
and MAC address of the user, and grants a lease to
the user. The lease must be periodically renewed by
the user.
3.3 Policy Manager
The Policy Manager simplifies the task of authoriza-
tion. It presents a high level language which makes
it easy for administrators to specify policies and ex-
presses these policies as rules to be manipulated by
the low level Network Access Manager.
3

The Policy Manager takes a user profile from the Pro-
file Server and a policy from the Policy Server as in-
put, and generates the security rules for a particular
user. The rules are then passed to the Network Ac-
cess Manager for enforcement.
3.4 Network Access Manager
The Network Access Manager dynamically enforces
the security rules it receives from the Policy Manager.
This is a low level service which is able to configure
the router, set packet filters, and set QoS parameters
on demand.
One of the features we implemented, discussed in
Section 4, is dynamic control of virtual lans, vlans.
Even though, many vlans may be on the same router,
no packets are allowed to cross the vlan boundaries.
This is supported directly by the hardware. This can
be viewed as several networks that are not attached,
even though they are on the same router.
IP filtering, another feature discussed in Section 4,
can also be dynamically controlled by the Network
Access Manager. With dynamic IP filtering we can
modify a user’s access on the fly. For example, we
can block the access of a specific source, destination,
or application.
3.5 Security Services
Popeye uses existing services to manage authoriza-
tion, user profiles, and security policies. This allows
for a modular design and separation of privilege[sec],
as the different security services can be managed by
different security domains.
3.5.1 Authentication Server
The Authentication Server is an external service
which validates users. The Web Server queries the
Authentication Server to validate users requesting
network access. RADIUS or Kerberos could be used
for this service.
3.5.2 Profile Server
The Profile Server is an external service which stores
user profiles. The Policy Manager queries the Profile
Server for instances of user profiles. LDAP could be
used for this service.
3.5.3 The Policy Server
The Policy Server is an external service that stores
the policies of security domains. The Policy Manager
queries the Policy Server for policies which match
user profiles.
3.6 DHCP Server
The DHCP Server is used to give a visitor an IP ad-
dress in order to use the network. It can be configured
to issue a particular range of IP addresses on specific
subnets. In Section 4 we discuss our use of DHCP in
more detail.
4 Implementation
This section describes a prototype implementation
of Popeye. The key technology we use is the Oplet
Runtime Environment (ORE) from Nortel Networks
OpenetLab [2].
Our prototype is implemented using a Nortel Net-
works Accelar 1100-B router, a Linux server, and
the research software from Nortel Networks Openet-
Labs. ORE is a Java-based software platform for de-
ploying services on network elements such as routers,
switches and hosts. ORE runs on the network ele-
ment as a Java virtual machine and enables services,
called oplets, to be dynamically downloaded to to
the network element. These oplets can provide new
functionality, such as traffic monitoring and intrusion
detection. Since ORE can run on a host, oplets are
developed on a host machine and then downloaded
to the desired network element.
For our project, Popeye, ORE runs on the Accelar
and oplets are developed on a Linux server. The Ac-
celar is booted from an image on the Linux server
using tftp. Oplets are installed from an http server
running on the Linux server. The Linux server has
two network interfaces: one to the Berkeley Intranet
and one to the Accelar.
Our goal as described above is to enforce per-user ac-
cess control to support mobile users and protect the
Intranet from outsiders. We focus our efforts on dif-
ferentiating ourselves from previous research: mainly
the dynamic hardware configuration. We bypass the
authentication step. For policy management we as-
sume a single policy, as a proof of concept, which is
to grant all visitors access to the Internet only. We
4

also assume an environment where mobile clients are
directly connected to a physical port on the Accelar.
4.1 Web Server
The web server is implemented as a Java
HttpServlet [3] oplet running on ORE. The advantage
of running the Web Server on the Accelar is that we
can get the visitor IP address directly from the client
and keep it secret. As we will show later, the IP ad-
dress is used to identify what physical port a visitor is
connected to. The Popeye servlet serves a web page
which requests a user’s name and password. It then
calls the Network Access Manager.
4.2 Network Access Manager
We considered two approaches for implementing the
Network Access Manager; IP packet filtering and vlan
access control.
4.2.1 IP Packet Filtering
The Java Forwarding API, JFwd, is a low-level ORE
service, which allows customized oplets to alter rout-
ing and forwarding behaviors by accessing the hard-
ware instrumentation. It includes a number of generic
service mappings such as MAC address, ARP, IP
routing, IP filters, IP Diffserv and VLAN (Virtual
LAN). A typical use of the JFwd API is to in-
struct the forwarding engine to alter packet process-
ing through the installation of IP filters.
Early in the project, we tried to use the ORE JFwd
service to do packet filtering by application and pro-
tocol. This would allow us to distinguish the applica-
tions the user may have access to and provide a secu-
rity mechanism on the type of applications we want
to allow. For example, visitors might be prevented
from using a Napster application , but allowed to use
the http protocol. Unfortunately, we discovered that
the JFwd service was not working properly in the
latest version of the Accelar so, we abandoned that
approach and pursued another approach.
4.2.2 Vlan Approach
The Accelar supports virtual local area networks,
vlans. Vlan is a way to separate a single physical
lan into several virtual networks. We configured the
Figure 3: Popeye Setup
Figure 4: MIB Tables
5

Accelar to have four vlans: Administration, Visitor,
Intranet and Internet vlan. Except for the Admin-
istration vlan, routing is not allowed between vlans.
In this way we partition the network into security
domains. No packets, other than configuration and
those setting vlans, are allowed by the hardware to
move between vlans.
Figure 3 shows our configuration. The dhcpd, httpd,
and tftpd servers are on the Administration vlan.
One port of the Intranet vlan is connected to the
Berkeley Intranet. One port of the Internet vlan is
connected to the Internet. All the remaining ports
are connected to the Visitor vlan.
When a user initially signs in to Popeye, they are
physically connected to a port on the Visitor vlan. In
this approach we want to move a guest user from the
Visitor vlan to the Internet vlan. This is done by ac-
cessing the Management Information Base, MIB, on
the Accelar. The MIB is a collection of managed ob-
jects that together form a virtual information store.
It is made available through a set of generic APIs
exported by ORE called JMIB.
Figure 4 shows some of the virtual tables available
from the JMIB. There are two ways we know of to
change the vlan of a port. One is to update the
vlanIds attribute of the Port table and the other is to
update the portMembers attribute of the Vlan table.
However, to update either of these tables we need to
discern which port our guest is connected to. The
ifIndex attribute of the NetToMedia table stores the
port in its two right most bytes. From the ip address
we received from the http connection we can index
into the NetToMedia table and get the port number.
4.3 DHCP Server
We configured a DHCP server on the Linux host to
serve several networks from the separated vlans. We
connected the dhcp server to the Administration vlan
and we set a dhcp-relay between the Visitor, Intranet
and Internet vlans, to the Administration vlan. This
design allows us to assign different subnets to the
different vlans. In the initiation of a new mobile user,
the dhcp server assigns an ip address from the Visitor
vlan subnet. In the second stage, after the visitor is
authenticated and his port has been moved to the
destination vlan (in our example the Internet vlan)
he will get a new ip address. The DHCP lease is set
really short on the Visitor subnet, so the client’s ip
address will automatically change.
5 Evaluation
5.1 Measurements
We measured the vlan setup latency with calls to
java.lang.System.currentTimeMillis() [4]. The la-
tency of the vlan setup is 2.0 seconds.
We measured bandwidth with the Iperf [1] tool, by
sending udp packets between vlans. Actual packets
are routed at wire speed, switched 100Mbps.
The Accelar supports up to 384 physical ports.
5.2 JMIB and JFWD
To access the low level instrumentation of the router
we are using the JMIB, a Java API for the MIB vari-
ables. JMIB is based on the published MIB definition
of the router. The advantage of doing so is that we
can get easy access from the application running on
the router to the device instrumentations. However,
this is slow. In our measurement it takes two sec-
onds to dynamically configure a physical port from
one vlan to another vlan. This is on the slow path,
and for our application, two seconds is OK. Using
JMIB might not be acceptable for applications that
need better response (e.g. reading a value 100 times
a second). For fast access monitoring we will need to
bypass the JMIB API and add low level optimizations
which access low level C wrappers and JNI access to
the router hardware.
JFwd is defined as an API to access the forward-
ing engine. JFWD performs mapping for underline
hardware functionality like MAC addresses, ARP, IP
routing, IP filters, IP DiffServ, and VLANs. The
forwarding engine performs at wire speed with no la-
tency. Some monitoring needs to be done in wire
speed, or at least sampling in high frequencies. As
a result, some control features need to be optimized.
JMIB as an underline API for JFWD might not be
acceptable to some applications. In these cases we
will need to optimize JFWD to have direct access to
the forwarding engine and bypass the JMIB.
6 Discussion and Future Work
Popeye also supports MAC address based access con-
trol for wireless clients. Since wireless LANs are es-
sentially a shared ethernet, MAC address spoofing
6

may be a problem. For organizations such as univer-
sities that desire some access control but don’t require
strong security, Popeye is perfect for the task. For or-
ganizations that require strong security, one approach
may be to put the wireless LAN on an outside net-
work and require users to use Virtual Private Network
(VPN), such as IPSec, to get back into the Intranet.
This approach has its own problems in that the hosts
on the WLAN may still be compromised through the
wireless interface while connected to the VPN, al-
lowing an attacker to hop to other machines on the
Intranet. Popeye can compliment such an approach
by containing the damage.
Another approach is to have base stations perform
user authentication and prevent MAC spoofing. This
can be achieved through the use of per-user keys
rather than network keys and is supported by 802.11
vendors such as Lucent and Ericsson. When coupled
with Popeye, the approach provides as good as secu-
rity as wired networks.
For future work, we believe the policy specification
deserves more research. We plan to design (or use an
existing) policy language and build tools that sim-
plify policy specification. Perhaps conflict resolution
is important as conflicting policies may need to be
specified. For example, a policy may specify that
no customer service representitives, other than the
manager of customer service, may have access to the
product developement hosts. Our intuition is that
the more specific policy overrides more general ones.
We plan to look into packet filtering policy languages
and tools and reuse as much as possible. We also plan
to implement the Policy Manager that can interpret
policies and generate rules.
As we discovered during the Popeye implementation,
the ORE service, JFwd, which implements IP filter-
ing, does not work properly on the latest version of
the Accelar router. We have reported this problem to
Nortel and hope to incorporate IP filtering into our
prototype once it becomes available. We also hope to
add support for RADIUS as the authentication server
and LDAP as the profile server.
Additionally, we hope to deploy it on the UC Berkeley
campus-wide wireless network. The deployment will
allow us to validate the modular design and study the
performance of our system.
Last, maybe Nortel will turn this into a commercial
product one day.
7 Conclusion
Many of today’s organisations use firewalls to pro-
tect their Intranets from outside attacks. Within the
Intranet, although assets are protected through au-
thentication and permissions, attackers still have ac-
cess to the local area network and can try to attack.
Frequently, visitors are not able to have Internet ac-
cess with their mobile computers for company secu-
rity reasons.
We propose a mechanism which would provide pro-
tection within the organization. It would block at-
tackers within from attempting attacks by inhibit-
ting their ability to send packets to the network. We
would also would like to allow visitors to safely access
(from the organisation’s perspective) the network and
Internet.
This will be done by dynamic IP filtering and dy-
namic vlan configuration. We can add fine-grain QoS
to applications, users, and destinations. Dynamic
network access control allows for more flexibility and
innovation on the type of services that can be pro-
vided. The fact that new features and services can
be added to the router on the fly, allows for flexibility,
customization, and innovation.
In essence we want to provide not only an external
firewall, but an internal firewall for each subnet on the
network. Programmable routers will provide filtering
mechanisms to enable this type of security. For in-
stance, the hardware can filter by source, destination,
port, and protocol. An access matrix can be built for
any combination of accesses between subnets.
Currently organisations protect themselves from the
outside world by firewalls on the edge of their organ-
isations. However, they are not protected from the
inside. The Popeye prototype demonstrates a way
to provide partial firewall functionality on every port
inside an organisation.
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8

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