Use of Formal models for the Firewall Policy Optimization

Firewalls are the core elements in network security & access control. A firewall controls the flow of traffic between different areas of your network. It uses a rule set called as firewall policy for this purpose. However as the size of rule set increases, specification and verification of the firewall rules becomes complicated and error-prone. This paper serves to provide an overview of the research efforts taken in the formalization of firewall policy specification and different formal models for firewall simulation, the verificationof firewall policies, which will help in detecting the potential problems in the firewalls and also anomaly free editing of the firewall policies. At the end an algorithm has been proposed to reduce the number of conflicting filters by introducing time field in the Policy tree representation.