PolicyVis: Firewall Security Policy Visualization and Inspection

Firewalls have an important role in network security. However, managing firewall policies is an extremely complex task because the large number of interacting rules in single or distributed firewalls significantly increases the possibility of policy misconfiguration and network vulnerabilities. Moreover, due to low-level representation of firewall rules, the semantic of firewall policies become very incomprehensible, which make inspecting of firewall policy's properties a difficult and error-prone task. This paper proposes a tool called PolicyVis which visualizes firewall rules and policies in such a way that efficiently enhances the understanding and inspecting firewall policies.