The ambient calculus is a calculus of computation that allows active processes to communicate and to move between sites. A site is said to be a protective firewall whenever it denies entry to all attackers not possessing the required passwords. We devise a computationally sound test for validating the protectiveness of a proposed firewall and show how to perform the test in polynomial time. The...

Consumers require personal firewalls that are highly secure, easy to use, configurable and up­to­date with the latest signatures to detect malicious network activity. Robustness tests were performed on a selection of the ten most popular firewalls by market share. The test system used was a vanilla installation of Windows XP with SP2 and all the most recent updates and patches. Each firewall wa...

Firewall configuration files are created and edited as text files, despite significant size, complexity, and the possibility of interaction between entries. We embedded interactive visualizations in a simple firewall ruleset editor. To make rulesets visualizable, we calculate the set of packets accepted by the firewall as a restricted case of constructive solid geometry. We show a lossless visu...

Web services security has been a challenging issue in recent years because current security mechanisms, such as conventional firewalls, are not sufficient for protecting service-oriented systems from XML-based attacks. In order to provide effective security mechanisms for service-oriented systems, XML firewalls were recently introduced as an extension to conventional firewalls for web services ...

The increasing complexity of networks, and the need to make them more open due to the growing emphasis on and attractiveness of the Internet as a medium for business transactions, mean that networks are becoming more and more exposed to attacks, both from without and from within. The search is on for mechanisms and techniques for the protection of internal networks from such attacks. One of the...

A secure reverse firewall, as recently defined by Mironov and Stephens-Davidowitz, is a third party that “sits between a user and the outside world” and modifies the user’s sent and received messages so that even if the user’s machine has been corrupted, her security is still guaranteed. In other words, reverse firewalls allow us to provide meaningful (and, indeed, very strong) security guarant...

An extensible firewall has been implemented that performs packet filtering, content scanning, and per-flow queuing of Internet packets at Gigabit/second rates. The firewall uses layered protocol wrappers to parse the content of Internet data. Packet payloads are scanned for keywords using parallel regular expression matching circuits. Packet headers are compared to rules specified in Ternary Co...

Smartcards are being used as secure endpoints in computer transactions. Recently, the connectivity of smartcards has increased and future smartcards will be able to communicate over the TCP/IP protocol. In this work, we explore options for using a smartcard as an active node in a communication network rather than as an endpoint. We envision in particular a proxy firewall running on a smartcard ...

An agile firewall coprocessor is described that is based on field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology. This implementation of the firewall enables a high degree of traffic selectability yet avoids the usual performance penalty associated with IP level firewalls. This approach is applicable to high-speed broadband networks, and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks are addressed in par...

We consider the telematics appliances, such as firewall, as a basic part of security system with specific preemptive priority queuing and access control algorithm oriented on multi-core implementation. Proposed randomized push-out buffer management mechanism with α parameter allows tuning very efficiently the loss probability of priority packets and the time they spend in queue as the factors u...