Survey on Unified Threat Management (UTM) Systems for Home Networks

Home networks increasingly support important networked applications with limited professional network administration support, while sophisticated attacks pose enormous security risks for networked applications. A Unified Threat Management (UTM) system strives to comprehensively protect a network by providing firewall, intrusion detection and prevention, as well as antibot protection in an integrated, easy-to-configure manner. Previous surveys have extensively covered the individual components of a UTM system, i.e., there is extensive literature on firewall surveys, intrusion detection and prevention surveys, and antibot protection surveys. Importantly, the previous surveys covered these protection services separately, without considering their integration (however, this integration is critical for comprehensive home network protection). In contrast, the present survey covers for the first time home network UTM systems, i.e., the integrated network security services provided by a UTM system for a home network. This UTM survey is organized according to the UTM components, i.e., we comprehensively survey the firewall methods, the intrusion detection and prevention methods, as well as the antibot protection methods that are suitable for a UTM system for a home network. Throughout, we view these methods from the perspective of integration into a UTM system with limited computational resources and limited network administration support. Our survey includes the protection capabilities, as well as the design and deployment aspects and software/hardware limitations of available off-the-shelf and open-source UTM systems. We find that effective integrated home network protection where the UTM system components synergistically support each other while operating with limited computational resources and network administration support still requires extensive future research and development.

I. Introduction

Home networks were initially designed for Web browsing and casual consumer applications. As the network infrastructure improved and Internet broadband costs decreased, home Internet usage transitioned from casual consumer applications to e-commerce and business-critical applications. Today’s home computers host Personal Identifiable Information (PII) and financial data and can serve as a bridge to corporate networks via remote access technologies, such as Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology.