TENNISON is a novel distributed SDN security framework that combines the efficiency of SDN control and monitoring with the resilience and scalability of a distributed system. TENNISON offers effective and proportionate monitoring and remediation, compatibility with widely-available networking hardware, support for legacy networks, and a modular and extensible distributed design.
For more details of this work, please see our recently published article in the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications:
Lyndon Fawcett, Sandra Scott-Hayward, Matthew Broadbent, Andrew Wright, and Nicholas Race
"TENNISON: A Distributed SDN Framework for Scalable Network Security."
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (2018).
The article is available here: http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/127188/1/tennison_CA.pdf
TENNISON offers the following:
- Extensibility
- Holistic view
- Rapid reaction
- Transparency and interoperability
- Kill chain detection support
- Legacy network support
TENNISON requires multiple components to function correctly. Below shows an overview of the system architecture:
As TENNISON is made of many components and is designed to work at scale, testing it can be challenging. The TENNISON testing harness automates the process in varifying functional and non-functional performance before deploying a change to production:
To get in contact about the project, please contact Lyndon at: [email protected].
TENNISON is licensed under the Apache 2 license and is covered by Crown Copyright.
- Lyndon Fawcett
- Jamie Bird
- Sandra Scott-Hayward
- Andrew Wright
- Matthew Broadbent
- Richard Withnell
- Nicholas Race
Details on getting started with TENNISON are available in docs/developer_guide.pdf
This repository is laid out as follows:
This is the primary component of TENNISON and is where the policy engine is located and is what decides what should happen to traffic. For extensibility it has southbound and northbound interfaces. The southbound interfaces are responsible for collecting a range of information from networks and hosts. The northbound interface provides users/developers with the ability to create their own security applications, providing TENNISON with rapid reaction capability.
These applications interface with ONOS. They assist in monitoring and remediation, providing the primitives to interface with the network.
This is a wrapper for snort that manages it, providing the coordinator with an ability to update rules and also a method of alerting the coordinator on attack detection.
This is the lowest level component of the system and sits at ONOS's driver layer and is what realises the OpenFlow pipeline. It has been created so that security and monitoring rules can be injected before any forwarding is applied. This makes the system transparent at the control plane meaning that it can work with any routing implementation.
This directory provides scripts to automate the testing and deployment of TENNISON, reducing the learning curve to working with TENNISON. Most of these are wrapped in the "tennison_experimenter" application.
