Firewall monitoring using intrusion detection systems

Abstract

Most organizations have intranet, they know the benefits of connecting their private LAN to the Internet. However, Internet is inherently an insecure network. That makes the security of the computer systems an imported problem. The first step of network security is firewalls. Firewalls are used to protect internal networks from external attacks through restricting network access according to the rules. The firewall must apply previously defined rules to each packet reaching to its network interface. If the application of rules are prohibited due to malfunction or hacking, internal network may be open to attacks and this situation should be recovered as fast as possible. In order to be sure about the firewall working properly, we proposed to use Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS)to monitor firewall operation. The architecture of our experimental environment is composed of a firewall and two IDSs. One IDS is between external network and firewall, while the other is between firewall and private network. Those two IDSs are invisible to the both networks and they send their information to a monitoring server, which decides, based on two observations, whether the firewall is working properly or not.