XML based open tool for anomalies detection in firewall filtering rules

In our days, firewalls are widely deployed to secure both hosts and networks against attacks and unwanted data flows. They control incoming and outgoing packets based on filtering rules´ lists which reflect the desired security policy. Therefore, filtering rules must be coherent, well edited and free from anomalies and mainly on the case of distributed firewalls. Many approaches, consequently, are developed to analyze access lists and validate them. In addition, many dedicated languages are used by constructors on the implementation of their firewalls. That´s why; we present, in our paper, an open tool which translates all filtering rules languages to a unified representation using XML. Then, we extract their fields from the XML file and analyze them by applying the appropriate algorithm. We have implemented this tool and the first tests show its efficiency.