Security Basics mailing list archives

Re: Firewall rules standards


From: Glenn English <ghe () slsware com>
Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2005 13:39:07 -0700

On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 14:11 +1000, Tran, Nhon wrote:

I support a number of customers using a number of different firewalls, and I
was wondering if anyone has any guidelines for the presentation firewall
rules or any firewall conventions when it comes to documenting the rules.
Ie name conventions for groups or services, or rules for the creation of
groups. Or the description of a rule
I know this would be hard and vary from administrator to administrator but I
was wondering if there is some sort of standard? My goal is to reduce the
amount of rules and make them readable.

I don't know if this will address your problem (or even if it's going to
work) but I'm in the design phase of a big, but simple, perl script that
is to generate config files for an IOS router, a PIX, a NOC, some Linux
workstations and some OS X workstations on my networks. 

The idea is to have the firewall rules for, say, email generated in a
single function so all the firewalls will do what I want them to and so
the rules being generated will all be in the same place -- on the screen
when I write the code -- so I can carefully deal with the syntax
variations.

And the comments are supposed to be such that a pass over the program
with perldoc will generate my security policy -- the rules will be
readable and the same in there, and I will (hopefully) never need to
look at the actual rules on the various platforms.

-- 
Glenn English
ghe () slsware com
GPG ID: D0D7FF20

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