A Distributed Firewall for Multimedia Applications

Overview

Firewalls are a widely used security mechanism to provide access control and auditing at the border between "Open" and private networks or administrative domains. As part of the network infrastructure they are strongly affected by the development and deployment of new communication paradigms and applications. Currently use of multimedia applications has rise. These differ in many aspects from "traditional applications", for example concerning bandwidth usage, dynamic protocol elements or multiple data flows for one application session. Corresponding firewall mechanisms and techniques did not change with the same dynamics though. This paper identifies typical characteristics of multimedia applications that cause problems using traditional firewalls.