FAME: A Firewall Anomaly Management Environment

Firewalls are a widely deployed security mechanism to ensure the security of private networks in most businesses and institutions. The effectiveness of security protection provided by a firewall mainly depends on the quality of policy configured in the firewall. How-ever, designing and managing firewall policies are often error-prone due to the complex nature of firewall configurations as well as the lack of systematic analysis mechanisms and tools. This pa-per represents an innovative anomaly management framework for firewalls, adopting a rule-based segmentation technique to iden-tify policy anomalies and derive effective anomaly resolutions. In particular, we articulate a grid-based representation technique for providing an intuitive cognitive sense about policy anomaly and facilitating efficient policy anomaly management. In addition, we demonstrate the feasibility and applicability of our framework through a proof-of-concept prototype of a visualization-based firewall pol-icy analysis tool called Firewall Anomaly Management Environ-ment (FAME)