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Abstract

A drawback of stateless firewalls is that they have no memory of previous packets which makes them vulnerable to specific attacks . A stateful firewall is connection-aware, offering finer-grained control of network traffic. Unfortunately, configuring stateful firewalls is highly error prone. That is due to the potentially large number of entangled filtering rules, besides the difficulty for the administrator to apprehend the stateful filtering notions. In this paper, we propose the first formal and automatic method to check whether a stateful firewall reacts correctly according to a security policy given in an high level declarative language. When errors are detected, some feedback is returned to the user in order to correct the firewall configuration. We show that our method is both correct and complete. Finally, it has been implemented in a prototype of verifier based on a satisfiability solver modulo theories (SMT). The results obtained are very promising..

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Ben Youssef, N., Bouhoula, A. (2011). Dealing with Stateful Firewall Checking. In: Cherifi, H., Zain, J.M., El-Qawasmeh, E. (eds) Digital Information and Communication Technology and Its Applications. DICTAP 2011. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 166. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21984-9_42

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21984-9_42

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-21983-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-21984-9

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