Challenges in Managing Firewalls

Abstract

Firewalls are essential security devices that can provide protection against network attacks. To be effective, a firewall must be properly configured to ensure consistency with the security policy. However, configuring is a complex and error-prone process. This work tries to identify the reasons behind firewall misconfigurations. To achieve our goal, we conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with system administrators that manage access control lists in networks of different sizes. The paper discusses our interview results and describes future work.