Flux Research Group / School of Computing

SeaCat: An SDN end-to-end containment architecture

Makito Kano

Masters Thesis, . August 2015.

areas
Networking, Security, Virtualization

abstract

Healthcare organizations heavily rely on networked applications. Many applications used in healthcare settings have different security, privacy, and regulatory requirements. At the same time, users may use their devices with medical applications for non-medical-related purposes. Running arbitrary applications on the same device may affect the healthcare applications in a way that violates their requirements. The ability of using the same device for multiple purposes in an enterprise network presents a challenge to healthcare IT opera- tions. To allow the users to use the same device for both medical and non-medical-related purposes while meeting the set of requirements for medical applications, we present the design and implementation of the SeaCat, an SDN End-to-end Application Containment ArchitecTure, and evaluate the system in a testbed environment. SeaCat has two major components. First is the container technology used in the client device to securely isolate any application. Second is the software-defined networking (SDN) that provides isolated secure network resource access for each application.