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Tri-Modularization of Firewall Policies

Published: 06 June 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Firewall policies are notorious for having misconfiguration errors which can defeat its intended purpose of protecting hosts in the network from malicious users. We believe this is because today's firewall policies are mostly monolithic. Inspired by ideas from modular programming and code refactoring, in this work we introduce three kinds of modules: primary, auxiliary, and template, which facilitate the refactoring of a firewall policy into smaller, reusable, comprehensible, and more manageable components. We present algorithms for generating each of the three modules for a given legacy firewall policy. We also develop ModFP, an automated tool for converting legacy firewall policies represented in access control list to their modularized format. With the help of ModFP, when examining several real-world policies with sizes ranging from dozens to hundreds of rules, we were able to identify subtle errors.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      SACMAT '16: Proceedings of the 21st ACM on Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies
      June 2016
      248 pages
      ISBN:9781450338028
      DOI:10.1145/2914642
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 06 June 2016

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      Author Tags

      1. firewall policies
      2. firewall tool
      3. modularization

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      SACMAT '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 18 of 55 submissions, 33%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 177 of 597 submissions, 30%

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