Towards a Framework for Automatic Firewalls Configuration via Argumentation Reasoning

Abstract

Firewalls have been widely used to protect not only small and local networks but also large enterprise networks. The configuration of firewalls is mainly done by network administrators, thus, it suffers from human errors. This paper aims to solve the network administrators' problem by introducing a formal approach that helps to configure centralized and distributed firewalls and automatically generate conflict-free firewall rules. We propose a novel framework, called ArgoFiCo, which is based on argumentation reasoning. Our framework automatically populates the firewalls of a network, given the network topology and the high-level requirements that represent how the network should behave. ArgoFiCo provides two strategies for firewall rules distribution.

Automatic Firewalls’ Configuration Using Argumentation Reasoning

“…The introduced tool is based on a formal framework, called ArgoFiCo that uses abduction and argumentation reasoning. The theoretical formalism used by ArgoFiCo is introduced in Section 3.1 and a brief introduction of Ar-goFiCo's preliminary results on the firewalls' configuration problem are given in [17].…”

A Decision Making Model Proposal for Firewall Selection

“…A firewall should have the following features in order to be functional; spoofing protection, user authentication, bandwidth control, network address encryption, data encryption and digital signature [2]. While configuring a network, network administrators make the decisions of configuring the firewall and these can bring challenges [5]. Human beings tend to make errors.…”