A Hierarchical Model for Firewall Policy Extraction

Firewalls are one of the most widely used mechanisms against security threats in distributed andnetwork systems.However, principled methodologies for firewall extraction policies have been scarcely investigated so far.We introduce a new model for translating low level firewall rules into higher abstraction level rules which allow for the inference of firewall policies. In order to do so, we introduced a new methodology based on rules' decorrelation algorithms that compute hierarchical firewall policies from lower level firewall rules. Further, we define a new effective model for the explicit extraction of blacklisted and whitelisted hosts and networks.