Location Aware Self-Adapting Firewall Policies

Private access to corporate servers from Internet can be achieved using various security mechanisms. This article presents a network access control mechanism that employs a policy management architecture empowered with dynamic firewalls. With the existence of such an architecture, system and/or network administrators do not need to reconfigure firewalls when there is a location change in user settings, reconfiguration will be automatic and seamless. The proposed architecture utilizes dynamic firewalls, which adapt their policies according to user locations through the guidance of a policy server. This architecture is composed of a VPN client at user site, a domain firewall with VPN capabilities, a policy server containing a policy decision engine, and policy agents residing in dynamic firewalls, which map policy server decisions to firewall policy rules, at server site. Key-Words: Network Access Control, Firewalls, Firewall Policies, VPN, Location Awareness, XACML, Policy Agents.