NoPASARAN: a Novel Platform for Analysing Semi-Active elements in Routes Across a Network

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel, collaborative distributed platform to discover the presence, or analyse the configuration, of what we call semi-active elements. By doing so, we revisit the ideas initially proposed in [1, 2] with the Netalyzr tool and in [3] with Inmap-t. Our contributions lie in a simplified and more powerful design that enables the platform to be used for a variety of tasks, such as conformance verification, security testing, network configuration understanding, etc. The specifications, design and implementation choices of the platform are presented and discussed. Two use cases are revealed to illustrate how the platform can be used. We welcome any interest shown by others in deploying our tool in different environments, and encourage any subsequent collaboration in improving its expressiveness.

Keywords

• conformance
• firewall
• ipsec
• man-in-the-middle
• network
• proxy