Firewall Security: Policies, Testing and Performance Evaluation

This paper explores the firewall security and performance relationship for distributed systems. Experiments are conducted to set firewall security into seven different levels and to quantify their performance impacts. These firewall security levels are formulated, designed, implemented, and tested phase by phase under an experimental environment in which all performed tests are evaluated and compared. Based on the test results, the impacts of the various firewall security levels on system performance with respect to transaction time and latency are measured and analyzed. It is interesting to note that the intuitive belief about security to performance, i.e. the more security would result in less performance, does not always hold in the firewall testing. The results reveal that the significant impact from enhanced security on performance could only be observed under some particular scenarios and thus their relationships are not necessarily inversely related. We also discuss the tradeoff between security and performance.