How accurate geospatial data can improve firewall effectiveness

Considering the fact that firewalls are often the only piece of software blocking potentially vulnerable ports, they’re all but mandatory when it comes to building networking architectures. Firewalls are mostly designed to block software attacks at the application-layer, but they often have to do so in a passive context. In order to better respond to attacks on an active basis, firewall developers are turning to bulk geospatial databases in order to figure out where an attack might be coming from.

Information technology specialists have deployed geospatial data in order to lay out hard coded security parameters that lock out systematic access points. Essentially, they create a sort of digital security fence that defines safe access zones. 

Specifying an access area 

While it would be theoretically easy to configure a software firewall to only accept incoming requests from a particular location, doing so in a haphazard fashion could give crackers the ability to spoof the place that they’re attempting to connect from. By directly mapping IP addresses to coordinates that are specified in a geospatial database, firewall developers have been able to better reduce the risk that incoming requests could come from outside bad actors.

In this sort of system, a request would be granted if it were delivered from the correct geolocation coordinate. Should the request come from outside of this zone, it wouldn’t be deemed valid and therefore be dropped in the same way that any other bad request would. While this does leave a system open to an attack by someone who could gain physical access to a system, there’s a good chance that anyone who had physical access to a particular machine could do far worse than merely send packets of data over a network.

Geospatial databases make it possible for specialists to configure extremely sophisticated blocklists that are based on more metrics than simply access location. 

Using a geospatial data feed to manipulate firewall rules 

A majority of firewall security packages function as a result of a set of administrator-defined rules. Packet filter-style firewalls inspect things at the lower levels of the TCP/IP stack and don’t allow them to pass through unless they match an agreed upon rule. Network layer inspection tends to perform fairly well, though they can be tripped up by certain types of injection attacks that spread worms via outbound web protocol transmissions.

Instead of defining rules based on the physical port number of a specific protocol, system administrators can set them based on their actual location. At the same time, they might wish to log some information collected from their firewall application and use it to maintain a record of the whereabouts of those who do get valid access. Considering the large number of cyberattacks that begin as a result of disgruntled employees or other related problems, this can help to dramatically reduce the risk of this kind of problem from occurring.

When bad actors do attempt to connect from a disallowed access point, the system would also make a log of this. Assuming that system administrators were as diligent about updating their geospatial databases as they were about updating their firewalls themselves, tracing these logs would be of little consequence. Particularly creative admins might even find other uses for the technology. 

Restricting access on a case-by-case basis 

Some materials might be acceptable for people working in a certain department but may be off limits to others. Those who know the geospatial coordinates of the location of each department in their organization could restrict access to individual resources based on the incoming request’s current status. However, they would do so only to certain records, thus an individual at a place that would be denied access to one database might actually be approved for another. Companies that deploy large numbers of IoT sensors might need to disable logging for certain users in this way.

Usually, this kind of processing would be out of the purview of a mere firewall and might have been relegated to some kind of anomalous hosts file entries. The adoption of geospatial data in the security market has made it possible for others to deploy sophisticated packet routing technology irrespective of their current skill set or their degree of experience working with these tools.

Unified threat management technologies, as a whole, are being quickly revolutionized by the addition of geospatial components to their existing software architectures. Not only has this made firewalls more effective, but it’s also enabling crafty software developers to incorporate firewall style technology into other more holistic security products. 

Building a true UTM platform 

A majority of security software vendors likely claim that they market some form of UTM, but a truly unified management tool would be able to deal with every threat that could possibly exist. This would include the ability to deal with unwelcome intruders from things like nematode anti-worms as well as traditional malware. Currently, such software isn’t on the market in such a finished state, though many specialists are working on it with the help of accurate geospatial data.

By ensuring that system administrators are aware of the odds that any given part of the world is at risk for launching certain types of attacks, they can be much more ready to deal with them when the need arises. A consistently updated database that constantly receives data about current attacks, perhaps delivered via XML feeds or a related technology, would be the best suited tool for dealing with this kind of a task.

While it might seem like a complete UTM platform is still somewhat elusive, it’s likely that this sort of development will make it that much more of a possibility in the near future.