A Flexible Policy-Based Firewall Management Framework

Firewalls are important elements in today's network security. This paper presents a flexible policy-based firewall management framework. The framework provides policy-based management to manage different types of firewalls, such as packet filter firewall, application layer firewall. It is important to know whether the firewall policy configuration and enforcement is correct. We believe that there is a need to verify firewall configurations before and after they are deployed. Our framework uses a analyze tool to discover inconsistency before policies are deployed, the tool is based on formal specification and analysis of policy rule relations. Our framework also provides an automated mechanism for validating firewall policy enforcement after they are deployed.