Secure network architecture based on distributed firewalls

Abstract

Firewalls are essential for networking, because they are security devices designed to help protect an infrastructure from unwanted traffic, malicious attacks and outsiders that want to gain unauthorized access. These devices, hardware or software, can provide different levels of protection, depending on the situation where they are used and the entity's security policy. Because to the different network topologies and the evolution of exploits in different forms, classic firewalls can become inefficient. A low budget solution to these problems is a distributed firewall developed with open-source tools, which brings new features and improvements. Our approach in this paper is to propose a distributed firewall that solves problems and improves the overall results in network protection. We suggest the distribution of security policies of a firewall into distributed devices that work together and obtain better performance. The traffic is split between several firewalls that analyze and decide if the incoming packets will enter the network, be dropped, rejected, or redirected to a honeypot. Our proposed distributed firewall has the possibility to be scaled with different numbers of clients and network devices.