Towards a Declarative Language and System for Secure Networking

In this paper, we present a declarative language and system for describing and implementing secure networks. Our proposed language, SeNDlog, is an attempt at unifying Binder, a logic-based language for access control in distributed systems, and Network Datalog (NDlog), a database query language for declarative networks. The contributions of this paper are as follows. First, we highlight the similarities and differences between Binder and NDlog with regards to their notion of location, trust model, and evaluation strategies. Second, we motivate and propose the SeNDlog language that combines features from Binder and NDlog. Third, we demonstrate the use of SeNDlog for specifying secure networks and present directions for future work.