Firewalls are essential security devices that can provide protection against network attacks. To be effective, a firewall must be properly configured to ensure consistency with the security policy. However, configuring is a complex and error-prone process. This work tries to identify the reasons behind firewall misconfigurations. To achieve our goal, we conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with system administrators that manage access control lists in networks of different sizes. The paper discusses our interview results and describes future work.

Firewalls are network security components designed to regulate incoming and outgoing traffic to protect computers and networks. The behavior of firewalls is dictated by its configuration file, which is a written sequence of rules expressed by a set of keys and parameters. In this paper, we investigate whether certain representations of firewall rule sets can affect understandability. To collect data for our investigation, we designed an online survey for an audience who are familiar with firewalls, in which we aimed to compare two different rule set representations: iptables and English. We collected data from 56 participants. Our results show that participants’ perception of a certain rule set representation depends on their firewall expertise. Participants with basic or intermediate knowledge of firewalls consider rule sets expressed in English to be 40% easier to understand, whereas advanced or expert firewall users deemed it to be 27% more difficult. We will discuss the reasons for these results and describe their possible implications.

Firewalls are computer systems that assess the network traffic using an ideally coherentand manageable set of rules. This study aims to provide means to measure the usability of firewall rulesets in terms of how easily IT professionals can understand and manage them. First, we conductedsemi-structured interviews with system administrators wherein we obtained the usability challenges relatedto the management of firewall rule sets. This was followed by the analysis of related work. The interviewresults were combined with the findings from the related work. Accordingly, we acquired four usabilityattributes related to the manageability of firewalls; these were formally defined. We tested and measured thecognitive aspects related to the structure and ordering of the rules through a user study. A third user studywith system administrators validated our metrics. It exhibited a very strong correlation between the metricsand how the administrators characterized usability.

A graphical user interface (GUI) represents the most common option for interacting with computer systems. However, according to the literature system administrators often favor command line interfaces (CLIs). The goal of our work is to investigate which interfaces system administrators prefer, and which they actually utilize in their daily tasks. We collected experiences and opinions from 300 system administrators with the help of an online survey. All our respondents are system administrators, who work or have worked with firewalls. Our results show that only 32% of the respondents prefer CLIs for managing firewalls, while the corresponding figure is 60%for GUIs. We report the mentioned strengths and limitations of each interface and the tasks for which they are utilized by the system administrators. Based on these results, we provide design recommendations for firewall interfaces.

Firewalls are network security components that handle incoming and outgoing network traffic based on a set of rules. The process of correctly configuring a firewall is complicated and prone to error, and it worsens as the network complexity grows. A poorly configured firewall may result in major security threats; in the case of a network firewall, an organization’s security could be endangered, and in the case of a personal firewall, an individual computer’s security is threatened. A major reason for poorly configured firewalls, as pointed out in the literature, is usability issues. Our aim is to identify existing solutions that help professional and non-professional users to create and manage firewall configuration files, and to analyze the proposals in respect of usability. A systematic literature review with a focus on the usability of firewall configuration is presented in the article. Its main goal is to explore what has already been done in this field. In the primary selection procedure, 1,202 articles were retrieved and then screened. The secondary selection led us to 35 articles carefully chosen for further investigation, of which 14 articles were selected and summarized. As main contributions, we propose a taxonomy of existing solutions as well as a synthesis and in-depth discussion about the state of the art in firewall usability. Among the main findings, we perceived that there is a lack (or even an absence) of usability evaluation or user studies to validate the proposed models. Although all articles are related to the topic of usability, none of them clearly defines it, and only a few actually employ usability design principles and/or guidelines.