Diseño e Implementación de un firewall de nueva generación usando herramientas de código abierto para el Instituto Superior Tecnológico Libertad

Abstract

The design of the new generation firewall solution (NGFW) in a test environment developed for the institution aims to secure the resources present in its network against possible attacks and intrusions. To achieve this, the state of the technological infrastructure was analyzed, identifying the possible risks to which it was exposed, in this process a new network design was proposed due to the deficiencies of the current one, in addition to identifying the sensitive assets to be secured and protected against possible attacks. For the design of the NGFW, a server was used on which the test environments were virtualized using open-source tools such as: pfsense, zentyal, proxmox, opnsense, these were configured to help us control access to network resources and traffic monitoring to identify possible unwanted behavior, navigation profiles and content filtering rules were also established. These changes helped to improve the performance of the institutional network by obtaining better response times in data transmission, it was possible to guarantee access to shared resources such as printers, network drives, scanners always without affecting staff productivity, there was an improvement in access to Internet resources thanks to the optimization of bandwidth use due to the policies and browsing profiles configured in the NGFW. Despite the implementation of security solutions, whether paid or free, it is necessary to educate users to be alert and take precautions to avoid becoming victims of phishing, malware, ransomware, which are the main causes of security breaches.