First Step toward Cloud-Based Firewalling

With the explosive growth of network-based services and attacks, the complexity and cost of firewall deployment and management have been increasing rapidly. Yet, each private network, no matter big or small, has to deploy and manage its own firewall, which is the critical first line of defense. To reduce the complexity and cost in deploying and managing firewalls, businesses have started to outsource the firewall service to their Internet Service Providers (ISPs), such as AT&T, which provide cloud-based firewal service. Such fire walling model saves businesses in managing, deploying, and upgrading firewalls. The current firewall service outsourcing model requires businesses fully trust their ISPs and give ISPs their firewall policies. However, businesses typically need to keep their firewall policies confidential. In this paper, we propose the first privacy preserving firewall outsourcing approach where businesses outsource their firewall services to ISPs without revealing their firewall policies to the ISPs. The basic idea is that businesses first anonymize their firewall policies and send the anonymized policies to their ISP, then the ISP performs packet filtering based on the anonymized firewall policies. For anonymizing firewall policies, we use Firewall Decision Diagrams to cope with the multi-dimensionality of policies and Bloom Filters for the anonymization purpose. This paper deals with a hard problem. By no means that we claim our scheme is perfect, however, this effort represents the first step towards privacy preserving outsourcing of firewall services. We implemented our scheme and conducted extensive experiments. Our experimental results show that our scheme is efficient in terms of both memory usage and packet lookup time. The firewall throughput of our scheme running at ISPs is comparable to that of software firewalls running at businesses themselves.