Distributed Firewall Policy Validation

With hacking attempts, the cost of security breaches, and the importance of defensive computer security in general all on the rise, strong firewalls are more relevant than ever. At the same time, demands for software diversity and increasingly complex network layouts make evaluating adherence to a unified security policy especially difficult. In this paper, I propose a method of uniformly validating firewall security policy in a heterogeneous network with a complex layout, using a hierarchical probing and test management system with very few host requirements and a simple security-policy language for easily mapping policy to evaluations for validation purposes. Preliminary tests indicate that such a system works well across a diverse network, even across the general Internet.