Conference proceeding
An unavailability analysis of firewall sandwich configurations
Proceedings Sixth IEEE International Symposium on High Assurance Systems Engineering. Special Topic: Impact of Networking, Vol.2001-, pp.139-148
2001
DOI: 10.1109/HASE.2001.966815
Abstract
Firewalls form the first line of defense in securing internal networks from the Internet. A Firewall only provides security if all traffic into and out of an internal network passes through the firewall. However, a single firewall through which all network traffic must flow represents a single point of failure. If the firewall is down, all access is lost. A common solution to this problem is to use firewall sandwiches, comprising multiple firewall processors running in parallel. A firewall sandwich system needs load-balancing processes executing on separate processors to manage the flow of packets through the firewall processors. The number of redundant load balancing processors and their redundancy management policies have a major impact on system unavailability. We present a model to analyze the steady-state unavailability of firewall sandwiches and compare the unavailability of various load-balancing configurations. The results show that, using representative non-proprietary values for system parameters, redundancy management policies are at least as important as the number of redundant processing nodes.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- An unavailability analysis of firewall sandwich configurations
- Creators
- S Goddard - Lincoln University - PennsylvaniaR Kieckhafer - Michigan Technological UniversityYuping Zhang - Michigan Technological University
- Resource Type
- Conference proceeding
- Publication Details
- Proceedings Sixth IEEE International Symposium on High Assurance Systems Engineering. Special Topic: Impact of Networking, Vol.2001-, pp.139-148
- Publisher
- IEEE
- DOI
- 10.1109/HASE.2001.966815
- ISSN
- 1530-2059
- eISSN
- 2640-7507
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 2001
- Academic Unit
- Computer Science
- Record Identifier
- 9984259486402771
Metrics
13 Record Views