Solaris Trusted Extensions Administrator's Procedures

Administration of Routing in Trusted Extensions

Trusted Extensions supports several methods for routing communications between networks. In the Security Administrator role, you can set up routes that enforce the degree of security required by your site's security policy.

For example, sites can restrict communications outside the local network to a single label. This label is applied to publicly available information. Labels such as UNCLASSIFIED or PUBLIC can indicate public information. To enforce the restriction, these sites assign a single-label template to the network interface that is connected to the external network. For more details about TCP/IP and routing, see the following:

Choosing Routers in Trusted Extensions

Trusted Extensions hosts offer the highest degree of trust as routers. Other types of routers might not recognize Trusted Extensions security attributes. Without administrative action, packets can be routed through routers that do not provide MAC security protection.

To support trusted routing, the Solaris Express Community Edition routing tables are extended to include Trusted Extensions security attributes. The attributes are described in Routing Table Entries in Trusted Extensions. Trusted Extensions supports static routing, in which the administrator creates routing table entries manually. For details, see the -p option in the route(1M) man page.

The routing software tries to find a route to the destination host in the routing tables. When the host is not explicitly named, the routing software looks for an entry for the subnetwork where the host resides. When neither the host nor the network where the host resides is defined, the host sends the packet to a default gateway, if defined. Multiple default gateways can be defined, and each is treated equally.

In this release of Trusted Extensions, the security administrator sets up routes manually, and then manually changes the routing table when conditions change. For example, many sites have a single gateway that communicates with the outside world. In these cases, the single gateway can be statically defined as the default on each host on the network. Dynamic routing support might be available in future releases of Trusted Extensions.

Gateways in Trusted Extensions

An example of routing in Trusted Extensions follows. The diagram and table show three potential routes between Host 1 and Host 2.

Figure 18–1 Typical Trusted Extensions Routes and Routing Table Entries

The context describes the graphic.

Route 

First-Hop Gateway 

Minimum Label 

Maximum Label 

DOI 

#1 

Gateway 1 

CONFIDENTIAL

SECRET

#2 

Gateway 3 

ADMIN_LOW

ADMIN_HIGH

#3 

Gateway 5 

 

 

 

Routing Commands in Trusted Extensions

To show labels and extended security attributes for sockets, Trusted Extensions modifies the following Solaris network commands:

For details, see the netstat(1M) and route(1M) man pages.

For examples, see How to Configure Routes With Security Attributes.