Distributed firewall for Linux

Abstract

The number of attacks on connected hosts has increased over the last several vcars .making the security of networks an increasingly important problem. Attacks have be come more automated and can cause greater amount of damage. This increase in attack coincides with an increased use of the Internet and with increases in the complexity of protocols, applications, and the internet itself. Critical infrastructures increasingly rely on the internet for operations. Individual users rely on the security of the internet, email, the web, and web-based applications to a greater extent than ever. Thus, a wide range of technologies and tools are needed to counter act the growing threat. At a basic level, cryptographic algorithms for confidentiality and authentication assume greaterimportance in network security .One of the most common ways that networks are hardened against attack is to tightly control what kind of network traffic can enter and exit the network using a firewall. Due 10 developments in distributed systems and network technologies, computer systems arc operated in different geographical locations with different security policies and procedures. So managing and monitoring the firewalls in distributed environments have increased the system engineers and network administrator's daily workload. Proposed distributed firewall can operate in a centralized location (using client-server architecture) and securely propagates firewall rules to remote nodes. Wireless Short Messaging Service (SMS) has integrated as a distributed node monitoring tool in this research. And also the simple user friendly firewall rule generation engine has changed the conventional IPTABLE rule implementation. Those features not only reduce the workload of engineers but also prevent the system failures and enhanced the security measures in the distributed environment. This work discusses the design and implementation of the distributed firewall concept, it simple mentation and preventing single point of failure in the architecture.