Implementing An Automated Distributed Firewall - 4178 Words

Abstract This paper discusses about implementing an automated distributed firewall in an emulated environment allowing researchers, educators and companies for research purposes and to experiment a realistic distributed firewall before implementing one in real life. This eliminates the manual configuration of each firewall which is time consuming and prone to errors and eliminate repeated experiments. Traditional firewalls are topology restricted and considerer everyone on the inside are trusted and one on the outside is a least potentially an enemy. In order to overcome the difficulties for traditional firewall the idea of distributed firewall was proposed. This demonstration will show a platform to automate emulated distributed†¦show more content†¦In the recent years, the threat that faces data and information has been systematically increasing, from viruses to organized gangs that aim to stifle the operations of information systems, steal crucial information or facilitate leakage of competitive information. A firewall is a collection of components, interposed between two networks, that filters traffic between them according to some security policy (Cheswick Bellovin, 1994). Due to the increase in network attacks and awareness of cyber security firewalls are used not only in companies but also in home networks. Firewalls are the frontline of defence to secure the networks from security risks and attacks from cyber criminals. Firewalls filters network traffic based on filtering rules defined by the firewall administrator or admin. Although firewalls protects from network attacks, virus etc, it depends on the firewall policies defined, if the policies are not defined properly it proposes a security risk and limits the effectiveness of firewall security. . There are mainly three types of firewalling techniques based on the OSI layer in which the firewall is acting on. They are (1) packet filters, which inspect each packet passing through them, (2) application Gateways which act on specific applications such as FTP, Telnet etc and (3) circuit level Gateways, which apply security mechanisms whenever TCP and UDP connections are established. Firewalls have