Firewall Queries

Firewalls are crucial elements in network security, and have been widely deployed in most businesses and institutions for securing private networks. The function of a firewall is to examine each incoming and outgoing packet and decide whether to accept or to discard the packet based on a sequence of rules. Because a firewall may have a large number of rules and the rules often conflict, understanding and analyzing the function of a firewall have been known to be notoriously difficult. An effective way to assist humans in understanding and analyzing the function of a firewall is by issuing firewall queries. An example of a firewall query is "Which computers in the private network can receive packets from a known malicious host in the outside Internet?". Two problems need to be solved in order to make firewall queries practically useful: how to describe a firewall query and how to process a firewall query. In this paper, we first introduce a simple and effective SQL-like query ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: OPODIS
• Authors: Alex X. Liu, Mohamed G. Gouda, Huibo H. Ma, Anne H. H. Ngu
• Keywords: Firewall, Firewall Query, Firewall Query Processing, OPODIS 2004, OPODIS 2007