Formal correctness of conflict detection for firewalls

  • Authors:
  • Venanzio Capretta;Bernard Stepien;Amy Felty;Stan Matwin

  • Affiliations:
  • Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Netherlands;University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada;University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada;University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2007 ACM workshop on Formal methods in security engineering
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

We describe the formalization of a correctness proof for a conflict detection algorithm for firewalls in the Coq Proof Assistant. First, we give formal definitions in Coq of a firewall access rule and of an access request to a firewall. Formally, two rules are in conflict if there exists a request on which one rule would allow access and the other would deny it. We express our algorithm in Coq, and prove that it finds all conflicts in a set of rules. We obtain an OCaml version of the algorithm by direct program extraction. The extracted program has successfully been applied to firewall specifications with over 200,000 rules.