Risk-Aware Routing in SDN

The role and importance of risk assessmentRisk assessment when making access control decisions have been discussed in Sect.  2.2.6 . In particular, we have pointed out that operational scenarios usually require finding the appropriate balance between ensuring confidentiality and availability of specific resource or service to users. The cost of potential unauthorized disclosure must be balanced with the cost of inability to perform operations or performing them based on incomplete data. Moreover, in practice, we seldom can base our decision on perfect information about trustworthiness of actors (such as users) and assets (such as network and user ICT equipment) used in operations. Our situational awareness is often affected by a large amount of uncertainty about the current state of the system. Therefore, in practice, every access control decision includes some risk acceptance, which the organization needs to adequately assess. In this chapter, we consider how the risk related to transfer of data over an SDN can be effectively managed.