NDLI: Formal Verification of Firewall Policies

Content Provider	IEEE Xplore Digital Library
Author	Liu, A.X.
Copyright Year	2008
Description	Author affiliation: Dept. of Comput. Sci. & Eng., Michigan State Univ., East Lansing, MI (Liu, A.X.)
Abstract	Firewalls are the mainstay of enterprise security and the most widely adopted technology for protecting private networks. The quality of protection provided by a firewall directly depends on the quality of its policy (i.e., configuration). Due to the lack of tools for verifying firewall policies, most firewalls on the Internet have been plagued with policy errors. A firewall policy error either creates security holes that will allow malicious traffic to sneak into a private network or blocks legitimate traffic and disrupts normal business processes, which in turn could lead to irreparable, if not tragic, consequences. We propose a firewall verification tool in this paper. Our tool takes as input a firewall policy and a given property, then outputs whether the policy satisfies the property. Despite of the importance of verifying firewall policies, this problem has not been explored in previous work. Due to the complex nature of firewall policies, designing algorithms for such a verification tool is challenging. In this paper, we designed and implemented a verification algorithm using decision diagrams, and tested it on both real-life firewall policies and synthetic firewall policies of large sizes. The experimental results show that our algorithm is very efficient. In practice, our firewal verification algorithm can be used in the iterative process of firewall policy design, verification, and maintenance. Note that the firewall policy verification algorithm proposed in this paper is not limited to firewalls. Rather, they can be potentially applied to other rule- based systems as well.
Starting Page	1494
Ending Page	1498
File Size	182750
Page Count	5
File Format	PDF
ISBN	9781424420759
DOI	10.1109/ICC.2008.289
Language	English
Publisher	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Publisher Date	2008-05-19
Publisher Place	China
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Rights Holder	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subject Keyword	Formal verification Iterative algorithms Internet Algorithm design and analysis Protection Telecommunication traffic Communications Society Computer science Computer security Testing
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

Sl.	Authority	Responsibilities	Communication Details
1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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