Emulating an Embedded Firewall

The Adventium Labs Embedded Distributed Firewall provides a simple interface for securely managing approved network flows between computers on a network. A “conversation” manager provides a simple interface for managing flows, defining the connections authorized between nodes on a network. These policies are enforced in hardware embedded in the network interface card of each computer. The policies are managed to create groups of communicating machines and services and to exclude undesired traffic. This paper describes the emulation of the Adventium Labs distributed embedded firewall, using an additional node associated with each user node emulated on the DETER testbed. We provide observations on our implementation and current experiments, and discuss how the emulation can be used by other experimenters.