Automation Tasks Model for Improving Hardening Levels on Campus Networks

Authors:
Publisher website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Campus networks are an infrastructure that enables communication and access to services for users in a geographic location. However, the design and implementation of a campus network could be more focus on connectivity than security parameters. This work proposes a model based on the automation of tasks that allows to increase the percentage of hardening in a campus network, with the objective of obtaining high availability and decreasing the probability of incidence of various attack vectors. The proposed model consists of three phases. In the first phase, the network topology is designed, the communication protocols are chosen, and the campus network is implemented in an emulator. In the second phase, the Ansible task automation tool is installed, and a playbook aligned to the hardening configurations proposed by CIS Benchmark is created. In the third phase, the playbook is deployed simultaneously in the campus network elements. Furthermore, we audited the hardening levels before and after the deployment where we obtained a remarkable increase in the percentage of hardening of the proposed campus network.