Automatic analysis of firewall and network intrusion detection system configurations

Issue title: Formal Methods in Security Engineering Workshop (FMSE 04)

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Uribe, Tomás E. | Cheung, Steven

Affiliations: Computer Science Laboratory, SRI International, 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA. E-mails: [email protected], [email protected]

Abstract: Firewalls and network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs) are widely used to secure computer networks. Given a network that deploys multiple firewalls and NIDSs, ensuring that these security components are correctly configured is a challenging problem. Although models have been developed to reason independently about the effectiveness of firewalls and NIDSs, there is no common framework to analyze their interaction. This paper presents an integrated, constraint-based approach for modeling and reasoning about these configurations. Our approach considers the dependencies among the two types of components, and can reason automatically about their combined behavior. We have developed a tool for the specification and verification of networks that include multiple firewalls and NIDSs, based on this approach. This tool can also be used to automatically generate NIDS configurations that are optimal relative to a given cost function.

Keywords: Formal specification and analysis, network intrusion detection, firewalls, network configuration and security

DOI: 10.3233/JCS-2007-15605

Journal: Journal of Computer Security, vol. 15, no. 6, pp. 691-715, 2007