Week10  Firewalls.

We need information about why we have to install the firewall for our system.
The below text book information given to us a lot of idea for the subject.

Selecting the Right Firewall.

When evaluating a firewall for you networks, ask the following questions:

·         What type of firewall technology offers the right balance between protection and cost for the needs of the organization?

·         What features are included in the base price?
What features are available at extra cost?
Are all cost factors known?

·         How easy is it to set up and configure the firewall?
How accessible are the staff technicians who can competently configure the firewall?

·         Can the candidate firewall adapt to the growing network in the target organizations?

Managing Firewalls.

The constraints of their programming and rule sets in the following ways:

·         Firewalls are not creative and cannot make sense of human actions outside the range of their programmed responses.

·         Firewalls deal strictly with defined patterns of measured observation. These patterns are known to possible attackers and can be used to their benefit in an attack.

·         Firewalls are computers themselves and are thus prone to programming errors, flaws in rule sets, and inherent vulnerabilities.

·         Firewalls are designed to function within limits of hardware capacity and thus can only respond to patterns of events that happen in an expected and reasonably simultaneous sequence.

·         Firewalls are designed, implemented, configured and operated by people and are subject to the expected series of mistakes from human error.

There are also a number of management challenges to administering firewalls:

1.    Training. Most managers think of a firewall as just another device, more or less similar to the computers already humming in the rack.

2.    Uniqueness. You have mastered your firewall and now every new configuration requirement is just a matter of a few clicks in the Telnet windows; however, each brand of firewall is different, and the new e-commerce project just brought you a new firewall running on a different OS.

3.    Responsibility. Since you are the firewall guy, suddenly everyone assumes that anything to do with computer security is your responsibility.

4.    Administration. Being a firewall administrator for a medium or large organization should be a full-time job by itself; however, that’s hardly ever the case.

  

Reference.

Whitman, M. & Mattord, H. (2010).  “Management of Information Security.”
Boston, MA, Course Technology, Cengage Learning.