The Margrave Tool for Firewall Analysis

Timothy Nelson, Christopher Barratt, Daniel J. Dougherty, Kathi Fisler, Shriram Krishnamurthi

USENIX Large Installation System Administration Conference, 2010

Abstract

Writing and maintaining firewall configurations can be challenging, even for experienced system administrators. Tools that uncover the consequences of configurations and edits to them can help sysadmins prevent subtle yet serious errors. Our tool, Margrave, offers powerful features for firewall analysis, including enumerating consequences of configuration edits, detecting overlaps and conflicts among rules, tracing firewall behavior to specific rules, and verification against security goals. Margrave differs from other firewall-analysis tools in supporting queries at multiple levels (rules, filters, firewalls, and networks of firewalls), comparing separate firewalls in a single query, supporting reflexive ACLs, and presenting exhaustive sets of concrete scenarios that embody queries. Margrave supports real-world firewall-configuration languages, decomposing them into multiple policies that capture different aspects of firewall functionality. We present evaluation on networking-forum posts and on an in-use enterprise firewall-configuration.

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