Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Syracuse University

Firewall Lab

Overview

The learning objective of this lab is for students to learn how firwall works by implementing a simple personal firewall for Minix. A personal firewall controls network traffic to and from a computer, permitting or denying communications based on a security policy.

Firewalls have several types; in this lab, we focus on a very simple type, the packet filter. Packet filters act by inspecting the packets. If a packet matches the packet filter's set of rules, the packet filter will drop the packet either silently or send an "error responses" to the source. Packet filters are usually stateless; it filter each packet based only on the information contained in that packet, without paying attention to whether a packet is part of an existing stream of traffic. Packet filters often use a combination of the packet's source and destination address, its protocol, and, for TCP and UDP traffic, the port number.

Lab Description and Tasks (PDF)

    For instructors: if you prefer to modify the lab description to suit your own courses, you can download the source files (Latex) from here.

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