International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887) Volume 122 – No.22, July 2015 16 A Novel Technique for Effective Optimization of Cross Domain Network Protocol for Redundancy Removal in Firewall Policies Madhura M.Unde ME Student, Department of Computer Engineering G H R College of Engineering and Management, Pune, India Simran Khiani Asst. Professor, Dept. of Information Technology G H R College of Engineering and Management, Pune, India ABSTRACT In today’s rapidly progressing professional world, internet is being used as a medium for almost every operation. Firewalls are extensively implemented to prevent unauthorized access to concealed networks and secure them. Based upon the applied policies a firewall can approve or decline the data packet by scrutinizing them. The large size and intricacy of modern networks result in big and complex firewall policies. Optimizing these policies is crucial for network performance inflation. Existing system facilitates inter-firewall or intra- firewall optimization within similar sets of administrative domains. They try to achieve optimization but at the cost of decreased network performance. In this paper, a protocol to increase the network performance while the cross domain firewall rules are optimized is explained. Rule optimization is achieved by redundant rule removal between the two firewalls. For boosting the performance and security, the data sent over the network will be encrypted and decrypted over a session key. Two types of rules i.e. network and user rules are supported. User can configure his own rules as per the required configuration in appropriate domain. Network rules will be common for both the domains and can be updated by the network administrator. The key technical experimentation is that firewall policies cannot be involved within similar domain areas because a firewall strategy contains exhaustive information and even potential security holes. General Terms Networking, Firewall Optimization. Keywords Cross domain firewall optimization; privacy; protocol optimization; redundancy removal. 1. INTRODUCTION A firewall is integration of software and hardware which secludes company's business (internal) network from the external network. They restrict false connections and enable specific connections to pass. It acts as defensive shield between server and external connections to this server. Many organizations continue to impute a remarkable percentage of their corporate "cyber losses" to inside attacks, signaling the need for more robust firewall filtering throughout the enterprise network segments [1]. Following are the causes due to which organizations deploy the firewalls extensively:  To prevent the attackers from accessing undisclosed information.  To prevent the attackers from altering or eradicating the important data hoarded in an internal network. Example can be URL spoofing to make illegal use of user's personal information.  To block the attacker from hampering the regular network’s internal performance. Firewalls are used extensively as  They can prevent unwanted network traffic.  They can deviate the incoming traffic to more reliable internal systems.  They hide susceptible systems, which can’t easily be secured from the Internet. A common example of such attack is to flood the target server with imitated connections to such an extent that the server is unable to respond to permissible connections, so much so that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered essentially unavailable leading to a server overload. Organizations have secret information stored on computers which includes trade secrets, monetary analysis, product development plans and personal employee records [1]. Packet filter is a most simple type of firewall while a combination of packet filter and application gateways can act as an advanced firewall. A firewall provides thus protecting the data’s integrity, availability and secrecy [2]. The data needs to be protected from unwanted changes to data. It needs to be available when needed. It needs to be secluded and secured when applicable. Firewall is a broadly deployed mechanism for enhancing the security of enterprise networks. To obtain the desired functionality a firewall system is implemented through a number of techniques. 1.1 Firewall rules A network firewall uses a list of rules for filtering packets from one network to another. Firewall rules accept or reject the network traffic passing via one side of the router to the other. Inbound rules limit access by outsiders to private data precisely permitting only a particular set of outside users to access private data [2]. Outbound rules regulate what outside resources local users have permission to. A firewall has two default rules, one for outbound network traffic and other for inbound [3]. The default rules of the modem router are :-  Inbound: Prevent all access from outside excluding the responses to requests from the LAN side.  Outbound: Permit all access from the LAN side to the outside.