Implementing UTM based on PfSense platform

Abstract

Today, as Network environments become more complex and cyber and Network threats increase, Organizations use wide variety of security solutions against today's threats. For proper and centralized control and management, range of security features need to be integrated into unified security package. Unified threat management (UTM) as a comprehensive network security solution, integrates all of security services such as firewall, URL filtering, virtual private networking, etc. in a single appliance. PfSense is a variant of UTM, and a customized FreeBSD (Unix-like operating system). Specially is used as a router and statefull firewall. It has many packages extend it's capabilities such as Squid3 package as a as a proxy server that cache data and SquidGuard, redirector and access controller plugin for squid3 proxy server. In this paper, with implementing UTM based on PfSense platform we use Squid3 proxy server and SquidGuard proxy filter to avoid extreme amount of unwanted uploading/ downloading over the internet by users in order to optimize our organization's bandwidth consumption. We begin by defining UTM and types of it, PfSense platform with it's key services and introduce a simple and operational solution for security stability and reducing the cost. Finally, results and statistics derived from this approach compared with the prior condition without PfSense platform.