Implementation of an

application layer
firewall
Team Guide-PROF. R. RADHAKRISHNAN

-By ,

Nishant Dwivedi
CSE 7th sem Section B
Class Rollno. 04

About Firewall
A firewall in a race car is designed to separate the engine
compartment from the driver so that in the event of a problem the
driver can be protected from what goes on in the engine compartment.
A firewall on a computer network is very much the same concept,and
that is to separate one portion of the network from another.
In technical terms, afirewallis a software or hardware-based network
security system that controls the incoming and outgoing network traffic
by analyzing the data packets and determining whether they should be
allowed through or not, based on a rule set.
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What is an application layer firewall?

There are different types of firewalls depending on where the
communication is taking place, where the communication is
intercepted and the state that is being traced.
Application-layer firewalls work on the application level of the TCP/IP
stack and may intercept all data traveling to or from an application.
They block other data (usually dropping them without acknowledgment
to the sender).
An application firewall is a form of firewall which controls input, output,
and/or access from, to, or by an application or service. It operates by
monitoring and potentially blocking the input, output, or system
service calls which do not meet the configured policy of the firewall
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How it works?
The application firewall is typically
built to control all network traffic on
any OSI layer up to the application
layer.

Main Objectives of an application

layer firewall
The firewall enforces the access control policy of the
organization.
Deep packet inspection-Application layer filtering goes
beyond packet filtering and allows you to be much more
granular in your control of what enters or exits the
network. While packet filtering can be used to
completely disallow a particular type of traffic (for
example, FTP), it cannot pick and choose between
different FTP messages and determine the legitimacy of
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a particular FTP message.

Contd.
Resistant to attacks1.DOS
2.Distributed DOS
3.Worms,Viruses,Trojan Horse etc.
4.Spoofing

Implementation
Preference will be to implement this in c++ and c using
some newly developed GUI libraries (like new versions
of GTK)support.
Reasons for this preference1.c++ and c are closer to assembly languages in
comparison of other high level languages.
2.Assembly level details are difficult to be manipulated
by an attacker in comparison of high level languages.
3.So from security point of view and customization point
of view also,
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Platform for this application

Main Focus, will be to develop it atleast for both
windows and linux(all popular versions).
Atleast all popular servers of windows must be able to
use this application
For example, ModSecurity is no.1 open source firewall
which source code is in C,and which works with the help
of Apache Portable Runtime.The mission of the Apache
Portable Runtime (APR) project is to create and maintain
software libraries that provide a predictable and
consistent interface to underlying platform-specific
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implementations

Some Points to be focused

according to need in industry
Application layer firewalls provide
comparison of network layer firewalls.

drawback

of

speed

in

But network layer firewalls provide less control over type of

packets and are more susceptible to attacks.
Thats why need of hybrid firewalls is increasing.
Pure hybrid firewalls have not been fully developed yet but
partial implementations has been developed.
No firewall is fully able to fulfill all needs.
Thus while developing the application need for hybrid nature of
firewall will be considered.
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Suggestions?

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