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In recent years packet-filtering firewalls have seen some impressive technological advances (e.g., stateful inspection, transparency, performance, etc.) and wide-spread deployment. In contrast, firewall and security management technology is lacking. In this paper we present Firmato, a firewall management toolkit, with the following distinguishing properties and components: (1) an entity-relationship model containing, in a unified form, global knowledge of the security policy and of the network topology; (2) a model definition language, which we use as an interface to define an instance of the entity-relationship model; (3) a model compiler, translating the global knowledge of the model into firewall-specific configuration files; and (4) a graphical firewall rule illustrator.

We implemented a prototype of our toolkit to work with several commercially available firewall products. This prototype was used to control an operational …