Distributed firewalls and IDS interoperability checking based on a formal approach

Abstract: To supervise and guarantee a network security, the administrator uses different security components, such as firewalls, IDS and IPS. For a perfect interoperability between these components, they must be configured properly to avoid misconfiguration between them. Nevertheless, the existence of a set of anomalies between filtering rules and alerting rules, particularly in distributed multi-component architectures is very likely to degrade the network security. The main objective of this paper is to check if a set of security components are interoperable. A case study using a firewall and an IDS as examples will illustrate the usefulness of our approach.