CY 520 Kingston University Firewalls and VPN Research Paper

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GUBE1234

Computer Science

CY 520

Kingston University

CY

Description

NOTE:I need the research proposal on firewall technology

Research proposal should be approximately 2500 – 3000 words (excluding references and citations) and specify the project background, motivation and relevance to your programe of study; its scope, aims and objectives; a plan of the major activities. Proposal should draw on current and recent research and other appropriate sources of information and cite these sources using a consistent Harvard referencing system.

You are advised to following the structure outlined below

  • Project Details
  • aim
  • LITERATURE REVIEW- background, motivation and relevance
  • scope, objectives and risk
  • sources and use of knowledge
  • ethics, legal, social, security and professional issues
  • schedule of activities
  • references
  • ethics form

Future I have to do thesis(desertion) on this research proposal, so please pick the proposal which has thesis(desertion).

please find the sample attachment below for clear understanding (i need exactly like that)


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Explanation & Answer

Attached.

Securing a Network: How Effective Using Firewalls and VPNs Are?
[Author Name(s), First M. Last, Omit Titles and Degrees]
[Institutional Affiliation(s)]

Introduction / project details
Computer networking has often been marred with constant security disasters in the past.
These security breaches continue to happen, as hackers and bugs continue to cause
unforeseen data leaks. A plethora of network security technologies continue to be developed
to help curb security disasters and malicious attacks.

How the firewall works retrieved from (Elumalai et al., 2019)
Today's networks have opened up our networks to unimaginable risks. With the advent of
free WI-FI and a plethora of mobile devices, it is evident that networking security breaches
will continue to be a significant hurdle in this age of information. The increased complexity
of our networks calls for a sophisticated network security technology.
Among these sophisticated technologies in securing our computer networks is a feature
likened to a border like a mechanism between our private local area networks (LAN) and the
wild tentacles of the rest of the internet, this divide has been termed as the firewall.
A firewall is a gadget or computer software that is developed to protect users in a private
LAN from any malicious outside attack. Its core function is to filter out malicious traffic,
which may be targeting a particular device in a private network. According to Cheswick and
Bellovin (2003), a computer firewall is a collection of components and systems which have
been placed between two networks, and it is a must for all traffic exchanged between these
two networks to pass through them. The firewall is devoid of malicious attack or penetration
(Cheswick and Bellovin, 2003).
However, a firewall is not regarded as a core feature of the internet. It has to be purchased or
installed separately. It also requires regular maintenance, which leaves a lot of people who
are not tech-savvy at risk of malicious attacks. When these people are attacked, they
compromise the entire local area network.
Aim
The aim of this project is to explore various firewall technologies that are incorporated as a
security measure across multiple computer networks. This research will seek to understand
specific questions accustomed to firewalls and definitions of concepts in computer
networking. The study will also explain the changing nature of computer network security as

malicious attackers become more knowledgeable in exploiting weak links in network
systems.
LITERATURE REVIEW- background, motivation, and relevance
Background
Firewall technology is used to protect the network by making all traffic to flow within the
firewall. This forms a bridge where individual data packets can be monitored and analyzed in
order to capture any malicious attacks. There are three basic guidelines that can be used to
protect a network they include packet filtering, application proxy, and circuit-level proxy
(Cheswick and Bellovin, 2003). Cheswick and Bellovin's work is a bit older, but coming
closer to the present day, we see that Schultz(2014) also classified firewall technology into
three. This includes packet filters, circuit gateway firewalls, application gateway firewalls.
Schultz also describes other techniques, such as hybrid firewalls and virtual private networks
(VPN). The latter offers end to end encryption of the network, which is a relatively modern
concept in firewall technology as compared to the rest of the techniques.
Motivation
The motivation for this project is to identify the different firewall technologies which may be
appropriate as the world embraces the internet of things. Nowadays, people have internet in
their homes, and a lot of this internet is on unlimited plans meaning the internet is left on
24/7. Home appliance manufacturers have identified this and are now building smart home
devices; however, a question begs, are they so smart as the claim? Can they handle malicious
attacks? With voice assistants and baby monitors which are connected to the internet in your
home, a breach of the home network could expose a homeowner to digital trolls such a case
reported in South Carolina where a baby monitor camera was hacked, and the attacker was
able to control the camera remotely (Domonoske, 2018).
Relevance
This research gives a detailed explanation of various firewall technologies while also helping
less tech-savvy people understand what a firewall is and the best firewall technology for their
individual use.

The working principles of firewalls
Packet filtering
A firewall is a combination of software and hardware system which is used to filter internet
traffic entering a private LAN. Firewalls create a bridge between LAN and the full internet
where every packet of information has to pass through. The filtering of traffic is carried out
using predefined rules and protocols. Firewalls can be categorized into two distinct
categories, which are stateful packet filtering and stateless (static) packet filtering.

The operation of packet filtering in a network
Static or stateless packet filtering firewall works by filtering the traffic of a network by
examining the header part of a message. The header contains information such as destination
address, the source address, and port addresses. One downside to this is the fact that static
packet filtering does not have the capability of knowing the origin of a data packet, whether it
came from inside or outside the private network. This limitation makes this method to be
easily tricked by spoofed packets. Spoofed packets are packets that have misleading source
IP addresses where their main aim is mimicking another computer and consequently
hijacking the mimicked computer traffic to steal login credentials or sending malicious
packets.
Stateful packet filtering works by evaluating the context of network traffic. This is done by
assessing both the source and destination addresses while also looking into the relationship
between the current packets and previous packets within the same session.
Application gateway Firewall
This method determines whether a connection was made and how it was made. The process
involves a complete stop of the flowing traffic at the firewall, and after inspection of the
traffic, the firewall makes a connection on behalf of the initial connection. This connection is
referred to as a proxy connection. This connection refers to a database which forms a basis
for determining if the next connection should be allowed or not.
The application gateway basically refers to a proxy connection to specific applications. This
is widely used in file transfer protocols (FTP), the mail, and telnet. This bars these
applications from running in the firewall, which effectively increases the security of the
connection. Every connection is subject to specific rules which are specific to the programs to
be accessed. The criteria can further use internet protocols (IP) destination and source
addresses to block or allow the connection. FTP proxy, therefore, has the capability to restrict
FTP access through the use of getting command and, at the same time, can block the put
command.
Application gateway firewalls can be classified into two categories, which are the generic
application firewall and the application-specific firewall. Application-specific firewall filters

on an application by application manner. While a generic application firewall gives an equal
connection for every application within the connection, however, regardless of the
application firewall used with proper configuration, the resulting network security can be
precise and useful. Application gateway firewall can also be used to hide information about
the host inside the internal network, thus keeping this information away from the rest of the
internet. Various commercial application gateways have been developed which offer secure
methods of authentication, which may be token-based.
Application gateways are one of the most popular firewalls. They are however not perfect,
and they are often faced with various challenges such as the client TCP/IP for which the
firewall is providing the proxy must know the firewall proxy which the firewall is running on
its behalf, this means that each client must be configured accordingly which is rather tedious.
The other limitation is the fact that unless a generic proxy mechanism is employed, every
application will need a unique custom proxy. However, for proxy services such as FTP,
telnet, and HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol ), this limitation does not apply since there is a
variety of proxy implementations that are available for these protocols. However, almost
every other service requires the proxies to be explicitly written for every service. Most of the
application gateway services are not transparent to the users; only a handful are transparent to
the users. Furthermore, most of these application gateway firewalls are not easy to configure,
and most of them require skilled expertise to update and configure them correctly.
Circuit Gateway firewalls
As aforementioned application gateway firewalls which receive a connection from a client
and momentarily cut a connection in order to verify a connection, the connection is not
always transparent to the user . to remedy this circuit gateway was developed. It is designed
to introduce a seamless and transparent connection, which is for the source and destination
address. The firewall uses a series of individual libraries and routines to make sure the
connection is transparent to the users. The connection has been coined as a virtual connection
which has end to end connection to both the client and the destination. Application gateways
are also advantageous in the sense that it does not relay packets through a second connection.
For every incoming connection rather, it allows more than one client to connect to multiple
applications at any given time in an internal network.
A lot of circuit gateways use the SOCKS, which is a tool that includes an array of client
libraries that serve the proxy interface with the clients. The SOCKS proxy works by receiving
the incoming connection from clients, where a connection is evaluated. If the connection is
permitted, the necessary data for the application is thus provided. In this case, both clients
send an array of commands to the gateway. Then the circuit gateway firewall invokes all the
stored conditions and restrictions and consequently establishes a connection to the destination
on behalf of the client. This makes the process transparent to the end-user.
The circuit gateway firewall has its limitations too. The first is the task of modifying the task
assigned to every client in order to make every client aware of the available proxy
mechanism, which is potentially time-consuming and costly. Circuit gateways firewalls are
also having the limitation of providing the universal access mechanism which is usually
independent of the semantics for the applications at the destination. This is because, for a lot
of instances, the associated danger of specific user actions is dependent on each and every
application within the connection. Lastly, most of the SOCKS gateways are not capable of
logging events.

Hybrid Firewalls
Most of the firewalls being used today incorporate more than one of the above-discussed
technologies' in order to capture advantages of one technology, which may be a limitation to
the other technology.
Virtual Private Networks
In the recent past, virtual private networks have been created which create an end to end
encryption for The network, this enables a secure connection between devices. This method
is often used in the firewall where they allow organizations to secure a tunnel across the
internet. This makes attackers who had set up network capturing devices in a network
obsolete. Even if these network capturing devices captured any information or data packets,
they would not b...


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