Fireman: A toolkit for firewall modeling and analysis
2006 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P'06), 2006•ieeexplore.ieee.org
Security concerns are becoming increasingly critical in networked systems. Firewalls
provide important defense for network security. However, misconfigurations in firewalls are
very common and significantly weaken the desired security. This paper introduces
FIREMAN, a static analysis toolkit for firewall modeling and analysis. By treating firewall
configurations as specialized programs, FIREMAN applies static analysis techniques to
check misconfigurations, such as policy violations, inconsistencies, and inefficiencies, in …
provide important defense for network security. However, misconfigurations in firewalls are
very common and significantly weaken the desired security. This paper introduces
FIREMAN, a static analysis toolkit for firewall modeling and analysis. By treating firewall
configurations as specialized programs, FIREMAN applies static analysis techniques to
check misconfigurations, such as policy violations, inconsistencies, and inefficiencies, in …
Security concerns are becoming increasingly critical in networked systems. Firewalls provide important defense for network security. However, misconfigurations in firewalls are very common and significantly weaken the desired security. This paper introduces FIREMAN, a static analysis toolkit for firewall modeling and analysis. By treating firewall configurations as specialized programs, FIREMAN applies static analysis techniques to check misconfigurations, such as policy violations, inconsistencies, and inefficiencies, in individual firewalls as well as among distributed firewalls. FIREMAN performs symbolic model checking of the firewall configurations for all possible IP packets and along all possible data paths. It is both sound and complete because of the finite state nature of firewall configurations. FIREMAN is implemented by modeling firewall rules using binary decision diagrams (BDDs), which have been used successfully in hardware verification and model checking. We have experimented with FIREMAN and used it to uncover several real misconfigurations in enterprise networks, some of which have been subsequently confirmed and corrected by the administrators of these networks.
ieeexplore.ieee.org