Modeling and Management of Firewall Policies

Ehab S. Al-Shaer; Hazem H. Hamed

doi:10.1109/TNSM.2004.4623689

Modeling and Management of Firewall Policies

Ehab S. Al-Shaer
, Hazem H. Hamed

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

186 Scopus citations

Abstract

Firewalls are core elements in network security. However, managing firewall rules, especially for enterprise networks, has become complex and error-prone. Firewall filtering rules have to be carefully written and organized in order to correctly implement the security policy. In addition, inserting or modifying a filtering rule requires thorough analysis of the relationship between this rule and other rules in order to determine the proper order of this rule and commit the updates. In this paper we present a set of techniques and algorithms that provide automatic discovery of firewall policy anomalies to reveal rule conflicts and potential problems in legacy firewalls, and anomaly-free policy editing for rule insertion, removal, and modification. This is implemented in a user-friendly tool called “Firewall Policy Advisor.” The Firewall Policy Advisor significantly simplifies the management of any generic firewall policy written as filtering rules, while minimizing network vulnerability due to firewall rule misconfiguration.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	2-10
Number of pages	9
Journal	IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management
Volume	1
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2004.4623689
State	Published - Apr 2004
Externally published	Yes

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This research was supported in part by National Science Foundation under Grant No. DAS-0353168 and by Cisco Systems. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations stated in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding sources.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Computer Networks and Communications
Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Access to Document

10.1109/TNSM.2004.4623689

Cite this

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Modeling and Management of Firewall Policies

Abstract

Bibliographical note

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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