Protocol-based testing of firewalls

Abstract

A firewall is the most important tool of network security defense. Its proper functioning is critical to the network it protects. Therefore a firewall should be tested rigorously with respect to its implemented network protocols and security policy specification. We propose a combined approach for test case generation to uncover errors both in firewall software and in its configuration. In the proposed approach, abstract test cases are generated by mutating event sequence graph model of chosen network protocol and filled with values from policy specification by using equivalence partitioning and boundary value analysis. A case study is presented to validate the presented approach.