Abstract
A Firewall is a necessity in the cyber world today. Cyber-attacks have become a guarantee for any large business or any network containing useful information. Firewalls can be very effective when intelligently designed and run for a single machine; however, they have an issue when they are part of an interconnected firewall network. Administrators are responsible for updating or changing each firewall individually, which has been shown to lead to many errors. In this paper we propose a solution: smart cooperative firewalls. Firewalls that can talk to each other, don’t need to be manually updated, and therefore have faster and more accurate attack response procedures. Our proposal, named DSN (Distributed Secured Network), turns multiple, but separate, firewalls into a dynamic network of firewalls all working together to combat cyber-attacks.
I. INTRODUCTION
Firewalls are the first line of defense and the most widely used tool in cyber security. They can be very powerful if applied correctly, but they are limited in their scope. Packets are analyzed as they come in and compared to a set of priorities. The limitation is that the priorities can only read and act on the header information of the packet: this includes data like the type, source IP address and port number, and the destination IP address and port number. Therefore the ability to act on incoming packets is quick but may miss attacks that are based on packet content. For example, a cross-site scripting attack could come from any IP; a firewall cannot predict where this attack will come from, so a new tool is needed to analyze packet content.
