Reasoning about firewall policies through refinement and composition

Abstract

Network and host-based access controls, for example, firewall systems, are important points of security-demarcation, operating as a front-line defence for networks and networked systems. A firewall policy is conventionally defined as a sequence of order-dependant rules, and when a network packet matches with two or more policy rules, the policy is anomalous. Policies for access-control mechanisms may consist of thousands of access-control rules, and correct management is complex and error-prone. We argue that a firewall policy should be anomaly-free by construction, and as such, there is a need for a firewall policy language that allows for constructing, comparing, and composing anomaly-free policies. In this paper, an algebra is proposed for constructing and reasoning about anomaly-free firewall policies. Based on the notion of refinement as safe replacement, the algebra provides operators for sequential composition, union and intersection of policies. The effectiveness of the algebra is demonstrated by its application to anomaly detection, and standards compliance. The effectiveness of the approach in practice is evaluated through a mapping to/from iptables. The algebra is used to specify and reason about iptables firewall policy configurations. A prototype policy management toolkit has been implemented.