A Representational state transfer web tool for firewall service management and monitoring in a Local Area Network
Date
2020
Authors
Guchu, Mary Wambui
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Strathmore University
Abstract
Firewalls play a very important role in managing and securing organization resources. Firewalls implementation come in different designs and architectures. However, one thing that is common in most implementations is that they are complex to manage and configure. As the number of rules and policies on a firewall grow, rule proliferation, the complexity in managing these services grow. Firewall are mostly implemented using UNIX based systems. A number of them that range from IP tables and uncomplicated firewalls (UFW) are application that run host based firewalls system on a Linux environment. These services are mostly managed, configured and orchestrated using the command line. As the network grows and the need for complex rules arises, the management of such firewalls present a challenge. Developing web interfaces to monitor firewalls and network operations is one approach. However, a huge part of the challenge is in service deployment and orchestration of firewall services. This research proposes a system that system and network administrators can use to easily manage and configure firewalls without necessarily logging in to the console of the devices or machines or setting up secure shell (SSH) session to the command line interface (CLI). The web tool that this work proposes bases its argument on creating a web interface that allows system and network administrators to centrally manage firewall services on simple HTTP like interface with PHP REST APIs running in the background. This work used a test driven methodology coupled with agile development, specifically extreme programming to develop the RESTful web tool for easy firewall service management and monitoring.
Description
Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Information in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of Master of Science in Information Technology
Keywords
Firewall, Firewall management, REST