The aim for any organization should be to state its security goal/intents and the underlying tooling/operator should be able to convert these goals/intents into actionable elements such as policies/rules.

Nimbus aims to decouple security intents from its actual implementation i.e., use of policy engines and corresponding policies and rules. This pattern exists commonly in Kubernetes world and the best example is a storage operator, wherein the user specifies the persistent volume claims with appropriate SLA (disk space, R/W, speed) and the operator figures out the appropriate volume to bind. Nimbus intends to bring in similar abstraction for security intents wherein the user specifies the security intent and the operator figures out the best implementation method available given the deployment.

• An Intent might get translated into a set of policies and not necessarily a single policy thus providing multi-layer defense. For example, an intent such as "Do not allow privilege escalation" could get translated in to admission controller policy and system policy as handled by runtime security engines such as KubeArmor.
• An intent could take into consideration runtime behavior and then handle intent implementation. For e.g., an intent could be "Do not allow privilege flags for pods that are publicly reachable".
• An intent might get fully or partially satisfied and the bindings clearly shows that status.
• An organization can provide a blueprint of intents given a deployment and the operator could go an try to satisfy those intents in best-effort or strict mode.

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This project is funded by NSF grant ...