Monitoring of policy operations in a distributed firewall environment

Abstract

Distributed firewalls concept has been introduced to overcome some drawbacks of traditional firewalls. Distributed firewall approach is based on the idea of enforcing policy rules at the intermediate and end points rather than a single entry point to the network. Management of policy rules in a distributed firewall environment requires surveillance of policy operations performed on each firewall. With this paper, we propose a monitoring architecture and its application prototype for distributed firewalls to keep track of actions, such as create, read, update, and delete, carried out on policy rule sets. We performed some emulation and laboratory experiments to obtain operational values of the proposed architecture. ©2008 by Boǧaziçi University.