Distributed Firewalling

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This post is part of the guide about “Firewalls and Firewall Policy in your Network”. The starting post is Firewalls and Network Architectures.

Distributed firewalling is an emerging security technology in firewall deployment that moves security from the perimeter to device endpoints. This is achieved by positioning a firewall in or directly in front of all endpoint and other appropriate devices in the network. Nevertheless,multiple entry and endpoints points make firewalls hard to manage.

The theory of distributed firewalling is that this can ease the burden on the perimeter and internal firewalls, which have traditionally been major chokepoints for network access. As distributed firewall technology evolves, it could largely or entirely remove the necessitate for perimeter and internal firewalls. Nevertheless, some organizations are presently deploying distributed firewalling.

Distributed firewalls rely on a central policy server that pushes security policies out to the firewall residing on each device. Distributed firewalls expand on the concept of centrally managing personal and host-based firewalls by giving each device a certificate that identifies it to other devices on the network. These certificates can as well be utilized to identify which machines have rights to certain resources—for instance, an internal Web server could have a security policy that exclusively grants incoming access to workstations with a specific certificate.

This concept offers access control between workstations (both inside and outside the organization’s intranet) and internal resources, permitting the network to scale well in an environment that’s mostly made up of mobile users. To help prevent spoofing, the distributed firewall system should enforce authentication measures that ensure the suitable identity of each endpoint on the network. Otherwise, an attacker can be capable to gain access to certificates and acquire unauthorized access to network resources.



17 Responses to “Distributed Firewalling”

1. Tatted says:

   What is Dynamic PAT ?
2. admin says:

   Dynamic Port Address Translation (PAT) is the process of NAT (changing the source
   address, destination address, or source and destination addresses of an IP packet) combined with changing the source port number, destination port number, or both the source and destination port numbers.
3. Sanchez says:

   What ASDM means ?
4. admin says:

   Adaptive Security Device Manager, graphical user interface (GUI
5. Sanchez says:

   What are the basic guidelines when designing a firewall system ?
6. admin says:

   1) Develop a security policy.
   2) Create a simple design solution.
   3) Use devices as they were intended.
   4) Implement a layered defense to provide extra protection.
   5) Consider solutions to internal threats that should be included in your design.
   6) The following subsections cover these five key design points.
7. david says:

   What should address a security policy ?
8. admin says:

   1) The resources that require access from internal and external users
   2) The vulnerabilities associated with these resources
   3) The methods and solutions that can be used to protect these resources
   4) A cost-benefit analysis that compares the different methods and solutions
9. Paul says:

   What protocols are difficult for firewalls to process ?
10. admin says:

    In general FTP and Real-Audio.
11. Arco says:

    What is the differences between policies and credentials ?
12. admin says:

    Policies are local and Credentials are delegated and MUST be signed.
13. Ken says:

    interesting post
14. P. Silva says:

    a very good article about Distributed Firewalling
15. Cam says:

    this is a very nice post
16. Mitchel says:

    Wow. What a great resource.
17. Ibram says:

    Real useful stuff, very handy for computer security.
    Thanks JAEC !