2009 IEEE International Symposium on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks Model Checking Firewall Policy Configurations London, UK July 20-July 22 ISBN: 978-0-7695-3742-9
The use of firewalls to enforce access control policies can result in extremely complex networks. Each individual firewall may have hundreds or thousands of rules, and when combined in a network, they may result in unexpected combined behavior. To mitigate this problem, there has been recent interest in the use of model checking techniques for analyzing the behavior of firewall policy configurations, and reporting anomalies. Existing techniques for firewall policy analysis are based on decision diagrams, most normally reduced ordered Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs). BDDs are a rich data structure, supporting more logical operations than just solving boolean formulae. Typically, search algorithms for boolean satisfiability (so-called SAT-solvers) outperform BDDs. In this paper, we show that the extra structure provided by BDDs is not necessary for firewall policy analysis, and that SAT solvers are sufficient. This argument is supported both by theoretical analysis and by experimental data.
Index Terms:
Model checking, firewalls, SAT, BDD
Citation:
Alan Jeffrey, Taghrid Samak, "Model Checking Firewall Policy Configurations," policy, pp.60-67, 2009 IEEE International Symposium on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks, 2009 Usage of this product signifies your acceptance of the Terms of Use. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||