Inferring Higher Level Policies From Firewall Rules

Overview

Packet filtering firewall is one of the most important mechanisms used by corporations to enforce their security policy. Recent years have seen a lot of research in the area of firewall management. Typically, firewalls use a large number of low-level filtering rules which are configured using vendor-specific tools. System administrators start off by writing rules which implement the security policy of the organization. They add/delete/change order of rules as the requirements change. For example, when a new machine is added to the network, new rules might be added to the firewall to enable certain services to/from that machine.