Hyron: A New Approach for Automating the Network ACL Delivery Pipeline

Automated Access Control List (ACL) configuration has remained an area of research interest for a significant period. However, previous research has not addressed the challenges associated with ACL automation in the context of a complex and evolving industry landscape. We examine the existing research literature on this topic and identify a series of key requirements (“success criteria”) that any new system must achieve to be considered an improvement over the status quo. We then design, develop, and demonstrate an approach to ACL automation that embodies these characteristics by combining model-driven ACL synthesis with a modern DevOps-style deployment system. We explain the rationale that drove the design decisions behind the Hyron ACL generation toolkit and how it can enable a fully automated ACL delivery pipeline when integrated with standard developer tools. In contrast to previous research, our design approach reflects automation trends in the industry to ensure mainstream engineers readily adopt our solution. We provide an analysis comparing our approach's benefits to those of previous research.