Revisiting the Firewall Abolition Act

Mobility and the New Global Economy are accompanied by requirements for dynamism and flexibility, with respect to e-commerce, inter-organizational activity, and security. The classical approach to computer security, typified by firewalls, is no longer suitable to encourage and facilitate the growth and nomadic collaboration foreseen for current and future corporate environs. This paper presents concepts and work-in-progress, manifested during our exploration of the Firewall Abolition initiative. At the core of our research is architecturally based Application Layer Security. While firewalls remain suitable for static protection of perimeters, they cannot aptly address mobile scenarios where legitimate IP ranges and device capabilities are disparate and indiscrete. Even the application of dynamic rule-sets in firewalls is easily susceptible to denial of service attacks. Application Level Security has proven to be a more formidable approach to satisfying both technical and strategic req...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: HICSS
• Authors: Philip Robinson, Jochen Haller
• Keywords: Acceptable End-to-end Security, Application Layer Security, Application Level Security, Biometrics, HICSS 2003, System Sciences