Treating modern firewall policy languages as imperative, special purpose programming languages, in this article we will try to apply static code analysis techniques for the purpose of anomaly detection. We will first abstract a policy in common firewall policy language into an intermediate language, and then we will try to apply anomaly detection algorithms to it. The contributions made by this...

Formal policies allow the non-ambiguous definition of situations in which usage of certain entities are allowed, and enable the automatic evaluation whether a situation is compliant. This is useful for example in applications using data provided via standardized interfaces. The low technical barriers of integrating such data sources is in contrast to the manual evaluation of natural language po...