PAPER PRESENTATION ON

ABSTRACT

FIREWALLS

Network security comprises the measures a company takes to protect its computer system, and it is a prime concern for every company that uses computers. Compromised network security means a hacker or competitor may gain access to critical or sensitive data, possibly resulting in data loss, or even complete destruction of the system. Appropriate network security is achieved when a user has to go through several layers of security before being able to access the desired network. The more layers the system has, the more secure it is. You may sprout a question, what is network? The networks are computer networks, both public and private, that are used every day to conduct transactions and communications among businesses, government agencies and individuals. The networks are comprised of "nodes", which are "client" terminals (individual user PCs), and one or more "servers" and/or "host" computers. Today, most companies' host computers can be accessed by their employees whether in their offices over a private communications network, or from their homes or hotel rooms while on the road through normal telephone lines. One of the most interesting parts of our paper is the research work we have done on the top 10 viruses and the PCs affected by them. We have also exposed the threat levels. Network security comprises of many areas like risk management, firewalls, secure network devices, network threats etcOur paper mainly focuses on tantalizing feature of network security,(i.e.) FIREWALLS which is a software or hardware used for security purpose in our present technological world. We discussed the topics about types of firewalls, features, what it protects u from etc.

1. INTRODUCTION
For the first few decades of their existence computer networks were primarily used by university researchers for sending email, and by corporate employees for sharing printers. Under these conditions, security did not get a lot of attention. But now, as millions of ordinary citizens are using networks for banking, shopping, and filling their tax returns network security is looming on the horizon as a potentially massive problem. Information systems have evolved in the last few decades from centralized and highly secure host-based systems to be decentralized. Enterprise computing systems, in which computers and information resources are distributed throughout an organization. It is often said that in the enterprise model, the network is the computer. In the 1980s uses gained important ground in the information age with the personal computer. Suddenly they could store vast quantities of information at their own desktops, rather than on centralized computers controlled by information czars. But of course potential for data theft, corruption, and eavesdropping increased. The situation got worse as companies installed local area networks (LANs) to connect everything together and in the processed increased opportunities for security breaches. Ultimately, the systems so large that they were hard to manage effectively.
To make things still worse, users of laptop and remote systems demanded connection into corporate offices from their homes, from hotel rooms, and from customer sites. Then the Internet becomes popular, and people inside the company wanted to connect out to it. To most administrators, the Internet is a nightmare that can potentially open the company's entire internal network to outsiders.

2. NETWORK SECURITY
Network Security deals with the problems of legitimate messages being captured and replayed. Network security is the effort to create a secure computing platform. Its important to build systems and networks in such a way that the user is not constantly reminded of the security system. Users who find security policies and systems to restrictive will find ways around them. Its important to get their feed back to understand what can be improved, the sorts of risks that are deemed unacceptable, and what has been done to minimize the organizations exposure to them. Network security measures are needed to protect data during transmission and storage to control access to networks and network nodes.

3. SECURITY ATTACKS

Interruption: In an attack where one or more of the systems of the organization become unusable due to attacks by unauthorized users. This leads to systems being unavailable for use. Interception: An unauthorized individual intercepts the message content and changes it or uses it for malicious purposes. After this type of attack, the message does not remain confidential. Modification: The content of the message is modified by a third party. This attack affects the integrity of the message. Most people associate safety and security with physical protection, which is also true with computers. The safety of computers data relies heavily on the physical security of computer itself. This is problem of 'wired' world. Computer data travels from one computer to another, leaving safety of its protected physical surroundings.

4. SECURITY BY FIREWALL
In order to provide some level of separation between an organization's intranet and the Internet, firewalls have been employed. A firewall is simply a group of components that collectively form a barrier between two networks. A number of features specific to firewalls and networking are going to be used throughout this paper, so let's introduce them all together.

What is firewall?
A firewall is a type of security for computers both personal and business. A firewall is produced as software and can be installed on to a computer. The main purpose of a firewall is to examine all the information entering a computer. If the information entering a computer fails to meet a certain criteria the information will not pass through into the computer.

How to implement a firewall?

Step1: Determine the access denial methodology to use. Step2: Determine inbound access policy. Step3: Determine outbound access policy. Step4: Determine if dial-in or dial-out access is required Step5: Decide whether to buy a complete firewall product have one implement by a systems integrator or implement one yourself

5. FEATURES OF FIREWALL
Depending on the features that a firewall supports, traffic is allowed or blocked using a variety of techniques. These techniques offer different degrees of protection based on the capabilities of the firewall. The following firewall features are listed in increasing order of complexity: Network adapter input filters Static packet filters Network address translation (NAT) Stateful inspection Circuit-level inspection Application layer filtering In general, firewalls that provide complex features will also support simpler features. However, you should read vendor information carefully when choosing a firewall because there can be subtle differences between the implied and the actual capability of a firewall. Selection of a firewall typically involves inquiring about the features as well as testing to ensure that the product can indeed perform according to specifications.

6. TYPES OF FIREWALL
Packet Filter: Part of a router which receives packets from one network and forwards them to another. Each packet is compared to a set of criteria and may be discarded, forwarded, or notify the sender. Packet filtering is low cost and doesn't require a lot of network effort. This only works at the network layer though and does not support sophisticated rule based models.

Circuit Level Gateways: work at the session level of the OSI model or TCP layer of the TCP/IP. They monitor packets passing through to check legitimacy. They are inexpensive and are able to hide information about the private network that it protects. However they do not filter individual packets.

Application Level Gateways: Also called proxies are similar to circuit-level gateways can filter packets at the application level of the OSI model. If configured to the web it will not allow any FTP, Gopher, Telnet, or other traffic through. They examine the packets at application level and filter specific commands. This cannot be done by packet filtering or circuit level. Can also be used to log user activity and logins, although they offer a high level of security they have a high impact on network performance.

Stateful Multilayer Inspection Firewall: Are fairly new and combine the aspects of the other three types. They filter packets at the network layer, determine legitimacy and evaluate contents at the application level. Allows direct connection between client and host. They recognize information by specific characteristics in order to allow them through. they are expensive but provide a high level of security and good network performance. However they are complex and if not used correctly can comprise security.

7. REASONS TO HAVE A FIREWALL IN PLACE

To protect against. . . Viruses and bugs through email Unauthorized interactive logins from intruders Unwanted materials, pornography, movies, literature, pop-ups Important private information that can be tampered with or accessed outside of a business or

organization Keeps important departmental information secure form being tampered with form other departments or disgruntled employees

Protect individuals information that is stored on there computer from being viewed or stolen. Helps to keep computer performance high by restricting the number of people that can access your computer and restricts the virus,

8. AVAILABILITY To increase the availability of the firewall, it can be implemented as a single firewall device with or without redundant components or as a redundant pair of firewalls incorporating some type of failover and/or load balancing mechanism.

Evaluating a Firewall Solution

There are many yardsticks against which a firewall system can be measured. We discuss some of these in this section, with the aim of generalizing the selection criteria for a firewall system, rather than discussing specifics of individual systems. 1. Cost: When putting together a firewall system, it is worth remembering that the cost involved does not end with the hardware and software purchases; there may also be costs involved concerning the installation of the system and the training of the firewall administrators. Additionally, there are likely to be ongoing costs associated with external support and internal administration of the firewall, as regular policy reviews and security audits are recommended. 2. Functionality: The functionality of a firewall solution is perhaps the most important criteria for evaluation; does a chosen solution fully meet your current and predicted requirements? You should have a growth plan for your network. Will your firewall still work three years from now? You might want to run the same software product but on different or upgraded physical hardware (e.g. to meet rising bandwidth usage). The lifecycles of network equipment for Internet connections are fairly short, so you should make sure that the basic architecture that you put in place is likely to be viable in the long term. 3. De-Militarized Zone: A DMZ, also known as a perimeter network, is a third network added between the internal and external networks, or alternatively an extra independent interface or more) on your firewall host. Services that you wish to be made available to external users may be located on the DMZ. If these services are compromised by an attacker, they will not have access to your internal network, because you will have another firewall, or rules applicable across another interface, to protect your internal network. 4. Media: Does the firewall system under evaluation support the media interfaces required, e.g. 10 or 100Mbit Ethernet, quad Ethernet cards, Gigabit Ethernet, ATM or FDDI?

5. Filtering: If a firewall performs stateful inspection of packets (e.g. SMTP, FTP or HTTP), or uses a proxy system, which protocols does it cover. And does the firewall have the ability to control the content of the data that passes through it. For example, firewalls often have the ability to provide access control and enforce policy for web browsing, and may also scan for possibly malicious content such as Java applets, ActiveX controls, or even viruses in e-mail attachments. Firewalls may alternatively be able to redirect content to another server for processing or filtering. 6. Number of interfaces: It is worth checking that the system under evaluation supports the number of network interfaces that are required; most firewalls should be able to perform filtering between more than two networks, e.g. for a "collapsed" DMZ configuration. 7.Fault tolerance: If the firewall goes down or is compromised, can a backup system take over automatically?

9. ADVANTAGES
1) The firewall protect us from viruses and many threats 2) Firewall are excellent at rejecting connection requests for inappropriate services 3) Firewall detect attempted intrusions 4) Firewall can reduce the actual attacks by insiders

10. DISADVANTAGES
Restricted Access to Desirable Services A firewall may well restrict certain inherently dangerous services which users of the protected network nevertheless want to use. Decrease in Throughput Firewalls may represent a significant bottleneck in communication between the protected network and the outside world. Concentrated Security while having security concentrated on one host has its advantages, a compromise of the firewall could be disastrous to hosts which are not running their own security software.

Complacency Both users and management may tend to become complacent about security when a firewall is installed.

11. CONCLUSION
I conclude my seminar saying that as hackers and many algorithms are there to break passwords and much valuable information, which leads to a great loss. Hence network security provides the remedy by many ways. Hence much more advanced security measures would be more helpful. So always that should be an eye on network security as it is much and more important

Bibliography
www.altavista.com www.wikipedia.com www.cse.buffalo.com