Design and implementation of virtual security appliances (VSA) for SME

The deployment of new security technologies in existing network topologies requires exhaustive testing before usage to avoid down time of the production systems. Nowadays, the required testing is in many cases omitted due to the complexity of creating test cases and experimental set ups. The VISA (Virtual IT Security Architectures) project [1], funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, aims to provide a simulation environment for semi-automated deployment of experiments based on system models. Building Virtualised Security Appliances (VSA) for enterprise networks is the most important part of the VISA project, which offers the user the possibility to build and deploy secured virtual machines and services within the model to improve it. The developed VSAs are based on mobile scenarios to establish secure connections from an Android smartphone to an enterprise IT infrastructure as well as a meta-data client/server system to establish a higher security level for existing infrastructures. The approach of VISA is therefore to implement such complex security systems easily within the basic environment of small and medium enterprises (SME). This paper is intended to describe the final results of the project, before the analysis phase has been started.