Measuring the Usability of Firewall Rule Sets

Firewalls are computer systems that assess the network traffic using an ideally coherentand manageable set of rules. This study aims to provide means to measure the usability of firewall rulesets in terms of how easily IT professionals can understand and manage them. First, we conductedsemi-structured interviews with system administrators wherein we obtained the usability challenges relatedto the management of firewall rule sets. This was followed by the analysis of related work. The interviewresults were combined with the findings from the related work. Accordingly, we acquired four usabilityattributes related to the manageability of firewalls; these were formally defined. We tested and measured thecognitive aspects related to the structure and ordering of the rules through a user study. A third user studywith system administrators validated our metrics. It exhibited a very strong correlation between the metricsand how the administrators characterized usability.Artikeln publicerad som manuskript i Voronkovs lic.uppsats.HITS, 470