Development of a Distributed Firewall Administration Tool

Abstract

Today firewalls not only guard internal computer networks but also individual personal computers against malicious and unauthorized accesses from outside. The purpose of this study is to create architecture and its corresponding application to manage distributed firewalls running on Microsoft Windows platform. Distributed Firewall Administration is about creating a management center for a network composed of the firewalls running on Microsoft Windows platform. Main important part of this work is to determine distributed firewall network topology with breadth-first search and depth-first search algorithms.The Microsoft Windows Firewall API makes it possible to programmatically manage the features of firewalls running on windows platform by allowing applications to create, enable and disable firewall exceptions. This study used the Windows Firewall API to manage the features of it. This API is only reachable using C/C++ low level programming languages.Distributed Firewall Administration Tool (DFAT) can add, modify or delete rules on the end-user firewall rule set, these rules stored on the database. This tool works on a distributed environment, there is a parent child relationship between firewalls. Parent firewalls have right to manage its child firewall.s rule set. Firewalls introduce themselves to each other with broadcast method.