Automatic Firewalls’ Configuration Using Argumentation Reasoning

Firewalls are widely used as the first frontier to protect the network from intrusions, vulnerability exploitations, and cyber-attacks. Usually, the configuration of this critical component of network security is done manually by network administrators that introduce human errors. In this paper, we present an automatic tool that is based on a formal framework, called ArgoFiCo. Our tool automatically configures the distributed firewalls of the network by generating conflict-free firewalls’ configuration. ArgoFiCo is based on abduction and argumentation reasoning and it permits the identification and resolution of anomalies in firewalls. Our tool provides an answer to the human error problem as it automatically populates the firewalls of a network, given the network topology and the high-level requirements of the network behaviour.