A Stateful CSG-based Distributed Firewall Architecture for Robust Distributed Security V. Ramsurrun, and K. M. S. Soyjaudah Electrical & Electronic Engineering Department University of Mauritius (UoM) Réduit, Mauritius
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[email protected] Abstract —Distributed firewalls have been developed in order to is provided at the very cluster level, the whole of the network provide networks with a higher level of protection than will become more secure as we can reduce the occurrence of traditional firewalling mechanisms like gateway and host-based both insider & external attacks, and limit their spread & effects firewalls. Although distributed firewalls provide higher security, more readily. A 2-active-node stateful CSG is used for they too have limitations. This work presents the design & protecting each end-user cluster in our working prototype. implementation of a new distributed firewall model, based on In this paper, we perform the following: stateful Cluster Security Gateway (CSG) architecture, which addresses those shortcomings. This distributed security model 1. Review of the strengths & limitations of distributed adopts a bottom-up approach such that each cluster of end-user firewalls. hosts is first secured using the CSG architecture. These different 2. Use of the stateful CSG to implement a new robust CSGs are then centrally managed by the Network Administrator. distributed firewall model. A file-based firewall update mechanism is used for dynamic real- time security. IPsec is used to secure the firewall policy update 3. Qualitative comparison of its strengths & weaknesses distribution while X.509 certificates cater for sender/receiver with other major software-based & hardware-based authentication. The major benefits of this approach to distributed distributed firewall architectures available.