Semantics-Aware Perimeter Protection

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Distributed Perimeter Firewall Policy Management Framework

Title from PDF of title page viewed January 9, 2018Dissertation advisor: Vijay KumarVitaIncludes bibliographical references (pages 66-72)Thesis (Ph.D.)--School of Computing and Engineering. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2017A perimeter firewall is the first line of defense that stops unwanted packets (based on defined firewall policies) entering the organization that deploys it. In the real world, every organization maintains a perimeter firewall between internet (which could be untrusted) and its own network (private network). In addition, organizations maintain internal firewalls to safeguard individual departments and data center servers based on various security and privacy requirements. In general, if we consider firewall setup in multinational organization's network environment, every branch has perimeter firewall and a set of internal firewalls. Every branch has its own security policies defined based on its specific security requirements, type of information, information processing systems, location-based compliance requirements, etc. As the branches of the multinational organizations span across the globe, managing the policies at every branch and ensuring the compliance and consistency of security policies are quite complex. Any misconfiguration of firewall policies even at a single branch may pose risk to the overall organization in terms of financial loss and reputation. In this dissertation, we present our framework to automate the policy management of distributed perimeter firewalls of a multi-national organization. We introduce new categories of policies to support centralized management of distributed firewalls and to ensure consistency and compliance of organizational and location-based policies. We define procedures for the initialization of firewall policies and policy updates. Our scheme is highly automatic that needs minimum human intervention to incorporate a set of new policies or update existing policies in distributed firewalls.Introduction -- Literature review -- Distributed perimeter firewall policy management -- Efficient design of Firewall temporal policies -- Identification of unsafe locations in IP and cellular based networks -- Conclusion and future wor

Semantics-aware perimeter protection

Web services security is becoming a critical concern for any organization adopting the XML-based Web services approach to application integration. While many access control techniques for Web services are becoming available, several issues still need to be solved in order to correctly split the burden of securing Web services between the perimetral and the service level. In this paper, a technique is presented able to make perimetral defences semantics-aware. Application-level {\it semantics-aware firewalls} enforce filtering rules directly on SOAP messages based on the nature of the services they request. Our semantics-aware firewalls rules are written using a flexible XML-based syntax that allows sharing metadata concepts with service level access control policies, supporting complex security policies that integrate perimetral defences with access control. Moreover, they can be quickly integrated into organizations' existing infrastructure, deployed rapidly and scaled as needed. Also, they integrate easily with existing infrastructure and can be operated by current staff, potentially achieving a low total cost of ownership with respect to service level solutions