Natural vs. Technical Language Preference and its Impact on Firewall Configuration

Firewalls are network security components designed to regulate incoming and outgoing traffic to protect computers and networks. The behavior of firewalls is dictated by its configuration file, which is a written sequence of rules expressed by a set of keys and parameters. In this paper, we investigate whether certain representations of firewall rule sets can affect understandability. To collect data for our investigation, we designed an online survey for an audience who are familiar with firewalls, in which we aimed to compare two different rule set representations: iptables and English. We collected data from 56 participants. Our results show that participants’ perception of a certain rule set representation depends on their firewall expertise. Participants with basic or intermediate knowledge of firewalls consider rule sets expressed in English to be 40% easier to understand, whereas advanced or expert firewall users deemed it to be 27% more difficult. We will discuss the reasons for these results and describe their possible implications.HITS, 470