Managing Distributed Personal Firewalls with Smart Data Servers

Modern security architectures tend to become more and more complex. Not only the chances to improve Web applications using several data channels and diverse (TCP-)ports are very promising, but also the risks for criminal attacks and an intrusion into the corporate network are increasing. The classical solution to protect networks against criminal attacks with firewalls is problematic, though. On the one hand, attacks from the inside are hardly prevented by firewalls, on the other, mobile computing poses additional security risks to the corporate networks. Personal firewalls solve some of those problems, but their central administration is very difficult. In this paper, we will discuss a possible strategy to manage distributed personal firewalls with a central tool, the Smart Data Server