A High Availability Firewall Model Based on SCTP Protocol

The growth and proliferation of computer networks allow businesses to efficiently communicate with their own components as well as with their business partners, customers, and suppliers. However, the flexibility and efficiency provided by such systems come with increasing risks, including disruption of services. To address the security issues, network and security managers, among other options, often turn to network policy management services such as firewall and intrusion prevention system (IPS) protection. This paper addresses "availability," one of the basic requirements of security management programs and proposes a model to support firewall redundancy based on the SCTP protocol.