Directed Acyclic Graph Modeling of Security Policies for Firewall Testing

Currently network security of institutions highly depend on firewalls, which are used to separate untrusted network from trusted one by enforcing security policies. Security policies used in firewalls are ordered set of rules where each rule is represented as a predicate and an action. This paper proposes modeling of firewall rules via directed acyclic graphs (DAG), from which test cases can be automatically generated for firewall testing. The approach proposed follows test case generation algorithm developed for event sequence graphs. Under a local area network setup with the aid of a specifically developed software for this purpose, generated test cases are converted to network test packets, test packets are sent to the firewall under test (FUT), and sent packets are compared with passed packets to determine test result.