Comparison of hardware firewalls in a network environment

Abstract: Today’s market offers a wide range of available firewalls, there are many manufacturers andeach of them has at least several series of possible solutions. As organisations and companiesseek to protect their assets against current and new hostile threats, the demands for networksecurity increases and drives the development of firewalls forward. With new firewalltechnologies emerging from a wide variety of firewall vendors, choosing the right firewall canbe both costly and time consuming. Requirements for a concrete network are needed to becorrelated with security functionalities, i.e., metrics for firewalls. Incorrect requirementsformulation or their incorrect mapping to metrics can lead to a financial loss or a firewallfailure in providing desired security functionalities. In this thesis, firewalls from three differentmanufacturers are investigated. Firewalls are compared and evaluated by using requirementsderived for Eskilstuna municipals network. To identify solutions fulfilling the requirements,metrics related to the requirements are identified. Two different placements for firewalldeployment are considered separately, as they have different requirements. The firewallcomparison consists of two steps. The first step of the comparison is done by evaluatingfirewalls from each manufacturer separately. After the best suited firewall from eachmanufacturer has been identified, the second step in the comparison is performed. The steptwo consists of comparing the best solution from each manufacturer between each other. Theoutcome of the comparison is a firewall solution that fulfills all requirements and can beconsidered as optimal choice for the investigated network environment.