A cross-domain privacy-preserving protocol for cooperative firewall optimization

—Firewalls have been widely deployed on the Internet for securing private networks. A firewall checks each incoming or outgoing packet to decide whether to accept or discard the packet based on its policy. Optimizing firewall policies is crucial for improving network performance. Prior work on firewall optimization focuses on either intra-firewall or inter-firewall optimization within one administrative domain where the privacy of firewall policies is not a concern. This paper explores interfirewall optimization across administrative domains for the first time. The key technical challenge is that firewall policies cannot be shared across domains because a firewall policy contains confidential information and even potential security holes, which can be exploited by attackers. In this paper, we propose the first cross-domain privacy-preserving cooperative firewall policy optimization protocol. Specifically, for any two adjacent firewalls belonging to two different admini...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Fei Chen, Bezawada Bruhadeshwar, Alex X. Liu
• Keywords: Administrative Domain, Administrative Domains, Communications, INFOCOM 2011, Security Holes