Capturing Domain Knowledge Through Extensible Components

Abstract

Recreating real-world network scenarios on testbeds is common in validating security solutions, but modeling networks correctly requires a good deal of expertise in multiple domains. A testbed user must understand the solution being validated, the real-world deployment environments, in addition to understanding what features in these environments matter and how to model these features correctly in a testbed. As real-world scenarios and the security solutions we design become more diverse and complex, it becomes less likely that the testbed user is able to be a domain expert in their technology, a field expert in the deploy environments for their technology, and an expert in how to model these environments on the testbed. Without the proper expertise from multiple domains, testbed users produce overly simplified and inappropriate test environments, which do not provide adequate validation. To address this pressing need to share domain knowledge in the testbed community, we introduce our Extensible Components Framework for testbed network modeling. Our framework enables multiple experts to contribute to a complex network model without needing to explicitly collaborate or translate between domains. The fundamental goal of our Extensible Components is to capture the knowledge of domain experts and turn this knowledge into off-the-shelf models that end-users can easily utilize as first-class testbed objects. We demonstrate the design and use of our Extensible Components Framework through implementing Click Modular Router [10] based Extensible Components on the DETER testbed, and advocate that our framework can be applied to other environments. We focus on wired network models, but outline how Extensible Components can be used to model other types of networks such as wireless. (This material is based on research sponsored by DARPA under agreement number HR0011-15-C-0096. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation thereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of DARPA or the U.S. Government.)