An Integrated Framework for Automated Firewall Testing and Validation

In today's global world, more and more corporations are bound to have an internet presence. This has led to a significant increase in network attacks of all kinds. Firewalls are used to protect organization networks against these attacks. Firewall design is based on a set of filtering rules. Because of the nature of these rules, and due to the rising complexity of security policies, errors are introduced when configuring firewalls. Therefore, reliable and automated techniques for validating and testing firewall configurations become a necessity before any deployment. This paper presents a new approach for testing firewalls based on their configurations. Our method is fully automated-from the generation of the test set to the detection and correction of the error in the firewall file.