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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: GR/R97733/01
Title: Certificate-Based Distributed Firewalls for Secure E-Commerce Transactions
Principal Investigator: Phillips, Dr C
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Department: Sch of Electronic Eng & Computer Science
Organisation: Queen Mary University of London
Scheme: First Grant Scheme Pre-FEC
Starts: 01 October 2002 Ends: 30 September 2005 Value (£): 67,161
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Networks & Distributed Systems
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Summary on Grant Application Form
Conventional firewalls rely on the assumption that everyone on one side of the firewall entry point is to be trusted, and that anyone on the other side is, at least potentially, an enemy. Recent research (see the Case for Support) concludes that about 70% of attacks originate inside the organisations themselves and are made by inside users. The author proposes researching and constructing a novel distributed firewall mechanism, where one or more administration facilities control many concurrent distributed firewall instantiations localised to individual host terminals. Each host instantiation enables its client user(s) to be members of one or more Closed User Groups (CUGs). For each group to which a client belongs, certificated keys are used to encrypt and decrypt data. Policy is also enforced so that all data received at the host is scrutinized and, when it is communicated to any centralised archive or to a remote peer/customer, it is first encrypted and its legitimacy confirmed. Fundamental to this concept of a secure working environment is the development of a distributed firewall scheme whereby policy control remains centralised whilst the operational dependency on topology is eliminated. Furthermore, the scheme will provide a framework for investigating distributed learning within a secure environment so created, where different firewall instances can learn and share information. about attacks and novel acceptable behaviour.
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