On firewalls evaluation criteria

Firewalls are one of the major products in the network and Internet security arsenal. No satisfactory criterion is currently available for evaluating firewalls. This paper enumerates considerations that have to be taken into account in order to develop an appropriate and meaningful evaluation criteria, and proposes a multi-dimensional criterion for evaluating firewalls. The criterion consists of three major components: security, performance and management. The analytical results of applying the proposed criteria on Check Point's Firewall-1 show the strengths and benefits of the proposed multi-dimensional approach.