Developing and assuring policy documents through a process of refinement and classification

Abstract

A system and method for developing network policy document and assuring up-to-date monitoring and automated refinement and classification of the network policy. The system administrator defines an initial policy document that is provided as the initial symbolic classifier. The classification rules remain in human readable form throughout the process. Network system data is fed through the classifier, which labels the data according to whether a policy constraint is violated. The labels are tagged to the data. The user then reviews the labels to determine whether the classification is satisfactory. If the classification of the data is satisfactory, the label is unaltered; However, if the classification is not satisfactory, the data is re-labeled. The re-labeled data is then introduced into a refinement algorithm, which determines what policy must be modified to correct classification of network events in accordance with the re-labeling. The network administrator then inspects the resulting new policy and modifies it if necessary. An updated classifier replaces the previous classifier.