2023–24 Projects:
Advisor: Amy Csizmar Dalal
Meeting time: TTh 1:15-2:00pm (Winter term)
Organizations spend a lot of time and money trying to keep the "right" types of data traffic flowing while keeping the "rogue" traffic out. Balancing the needs of the people in an organization with the needs of secure computing is a difficult challenge. Firewalls are one way to restrict the traffic flow into and out of an organization's computer network. Firewalls examine incoming traffic and filter out certain types of traffic based on various criteria: IP address, port number, patterns in the actual data portion of packets, etc.
Much time and energy has been spent on building effective firewalls. One key design decision in building a firewall is in updating the firewall's rule set. How does a firewall handle new types of traffic, or old types of traffic masquerading as "unknown" traffic (i.e., peer-to-peer traffic that uses port 80, the http port)? How does it balance security and openness/access?
In this project, you will combine your knowledge of computer networking with your knowledge of computer security to develop a software-based firewall for the Carleton network. The firewall should apply rules to traffic both entering and leaving Carleton's network. In addition, the firewall should be able to "learn" new rules on the fly through its observations of incoming network traffic patterns.
Your tasks will include:
TCP state diagram, from W. Richard Steven's books.
D.B. Chapman. "Network (In)Security Through IP Packet Filtering.". Proceedings of the Third USENIX UNIX Security Symposium, Baltimore, MD, September 1992.
W. Cheswick, S. Bellovin, and A. Rubin. Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker, 2nd edition. Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2003. (available in the library)
S. Bellovin. "A Look Back at 'Security Problems in the TCP/IP Protocol Suite'." 20th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 2004.
R. Russell. Linux IPCHAINS-HOWTO. The Linux Documentation Project, 2000.