Simulation environment for mobile Virtualized Security Appliances

The deployment of new security technologies in existing network topologies requires exhaustive testing before usage to avoid down time of productive systems. Nowadays, the required testing is omitted in many cases due to the complexity of creating test cases and experimental set ups. The VISA (Virtual IT Security Architectures) project, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, aims to provide a simulation environment for semi-automated deployment experiments based on system models. Building Virtualized Security Appliances (VSA) is one part of the VISA project which offers the user the possibility to build and deploy secured virtual machine(s) and services within the model to improve it. Two of the developed VSAs are based on mobile scenarios to establish secure connections from an Android smartphone to an enterprise IT infrastructure. The approach of VISA is to implement such complex security systems much more easily within the basic configuration settings for small and medium enterprises (SME).