The objective of the Systems-Level Network Design project is to examine networking infrastructures using system-level analysis approaches. Specifically, we examined the implications of a portable computing system moving from one infrastructure to another yet expecting the same services. Our driving example was a portable computer being taken from our research lab (a reasonably secure environment) to our department network (a cooperative environment) and then to a coffee shop in downtown Lawrence (a highly insecure, uncooperative environment) while working on the same project. We tried to establish that movement between infrastructures would be as transparent as possible without sacrificing security requirements.

The research took three paths: (i) examining representation of security policies; (ii) developing networking components in Rosetta; and (iii) developing simulation-based analysis techniques for the Rosetta models.

Our network component models centered on defining a basic communicating network object. This object was then customized to define networking components such as routers, host systems, firewalls and other devices as needed. The models also supported definition security constraints over the devices.

Our simulation capability centered on executing models defined in a prescriptive fashion and examining their behavior with respect to Rosetta constraint models. This provided the ability to understand when security requirements and resource requirements were and were not met.