Securing Network Using PfSense Technology

  • Fatema Bahram, Dr. J.Godwin Ponsam

Abstract

Network Security is a critical aspect of network management. Although, organizations invest millions of dollars a year to secure valuable data. Many industries still struggle to implement the right security tools to secure and mitigate the risk. However, there is no shortage of firewalls and security technologies in the market, but all are not suitable and companies implement the security products that provide insufficient or redundant capabilities. While investing in security technologies it has to be considered to leverage a full-featured technology rather than having multiple security tools in the network. For centralized control and better management, a set of security services  need to be integrated into a single security package. One of the most efficient solutions offered by an open-source firewall called pfSense.

PfSense is an open-source technology which is developed based on FreeBSD operating system that provides a comprehensive network security solution. PfSense integrates all of the security services such as firewall, router, Virtual Private Network (VPN), URL filtering,Load Balancer or Multi-WAN Router, Network Address Translation (NAT),Active Directory and Captive Portal for authentication of user in wireless network, log analyze to make the network more secure, and layer 7 capabilities provides a powerful solution to control traffic based on application patterns and used as a tool with different open source software that work together to detect and disable network attacks.

Different articles exist related to pfSense. I found that non of the article considered on VPN which is a strong technology used to secure the network, In this paper we presented an approach on the VPN pfSense feature to secure the network. Also in order to optimize the bandwidth and minimize the amount of undesirable downloading/uploading the squid proxy server and squid guard proxy filter are implemented.

 Keywords: Security, FreeBSD, Virtual Private Network (VPN), Internet Protocol Security (IPsec),Graphic User Interface(GUI), Squid Proxy Server, Squid Proxy Filter. URL filtering.

Published
2020-05-30
How to Cite
Fatema Bahram, Dr. J.Godwin Ponsam. (2020). Securing Network Using PfSense Technology. International Journal of Advanced Science and Technology, 29(05), 9667 - 9675. Retrieved from http://sersc.org/journals/index.php/IJAST/article/view/19431