TopoIntent: Compiling Security Intent into Executable, Compliance-Checked Network Topologies

2026-08-13

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of automatically translating unstructured natural language security requirements into compliant, executable network topologies. It presents the first end-to-end framework that compiles ambiguous security intents into network architectures adhering to CIS Controls v8.1.2. The approach leverages schema contracts to constrain intent semantics, employs dense vector retrieval to match reference architectures, and fuses user intent with templates in a staged manner, followed by structure-preserving incremental editing to complete security policies. The system supports human-in-the-loop validation for uncovered scenarios and exports configurations for Mininet and iptables. Evaluated on financial and governmental test sets, the framework achieves full CIS compliance—raising topology compliance from 0.78 to 1.00—with an average of only 1.5 refinement rounds, while access control list (ACL) policies attain a one-round feedback pass rate of 0.88.

Abstract

Enterprise security topology design requires translating business intent, regulatory requirements, and risk assumptions into zones, boundary devices, inter-zone paths, and access-control policies. Existing NetOps automation tools mainly operate after this design is fixed, providing limited support for generating structured security topologies from underspecified natural-language requirements. We present TopoIntent, a system that compiles security intent into executable, compliance-checked network topologies. It uses a schema contract to constrain generation, retrieves reference architectures from a curated template library via dense-vector search, and applies staged fusion for intent-template alignment and security completion. The generated topology is checked against CIS Controls v8.1.2 safeguards visible at the topology layer, while unresolved cases are marked for manual review. Structural gaps are repaired through additive schema-preserving edits. The final topology is exported to Mininet scripts with kernel-level iptables ACLs, enabling executable reachability and allow/deny tests. Because no public benchmark exists for this requirement-to-topology task, we construct an evaluation set from reference security architecture diagrams. The retrieval set contains 22 templates and 44 synthetic intents across five scenarios, while the held-out set contains 7 templates and 14 intents from finance and government scenarios excluded from retrieval. On the held-out set, additive repair improves topology-visible CIS satisfaction from 0.78 to 1.00 in fewer than 1.5 rounds on average, and one feedback round raises the post-ACL policy pass rate from 0.78 to 0.88.

Problem

• security intent
• network topology
• compliance checking
• access control
• enterprise security

Innovation

• security intent compilation
• compliance-checked topology
• schema-constrained generation
• additive schema-preserving repair
• executable network topology