Diverse Firewall Design

Overview

Firewalls are the mainstay of enterprise security and the most widely adopted technology for protecting private networks. An error in a firewall policy 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. It has been observed that most firewall policies on the Internet are poorly designed and have many errors. Therefore, how to design firewall policies correctly is an important issue. This paper propose the method of diverse firewall design, which consists of three phases: a design phase, a comparison phase, and a resolution phase.