The Zodiac Policy Subsystem: a Policy-Based Management System for a High-Security MANET

Zodiac (Zero Outage Dynamic Intrinsically Assurable Communities) is an implementation of a high-security MANET, resistant to multiple types of attacks, including Byzantine faults. The Zodiac architecture poses a set of unique system security, performance, and usability requirements to its policy-based management system (PBMS). In this paper, we identify theses requirements, and present the design and implementation of the Zodiac Policy Subsystem (ZPS), which allows administrators to securely specify, distribute and evaluate network control and system security policies to customize Zodiac behaviors. ZPS uses the Keynote language for specifying all authorization policies with simple extension to support obligation policies.