An Efficient Administration for Multiple Firewalls in Cloud Environments

In a cloud environment, a tenant can create multiple virtual networks for performance and security requirements. In each virtual network, there can be multiple firewalls deployed for controlling inbound and outbound data traffics. Configuration of firewalls in such a situation is challenging since policies of individual networks could interfere each others. In this paper, we propose an approach that can efficiently administrate multiple firewalls by considering multiple firewalls that belong to a tenant as a single meta firewall. Managing multiple firewalls can be done by configuring the meta firewall. An implementation of our scheme for Openstack and iptables-based firewalls is also introduced in this paper.