RSVP as firewall signalling protocol

Within a global networked environment, security aspects have become more and more important and access control at network borders is considered essential. For this purpose firewall systems are used which provide a well-established security mechanism to restrict the exchanged traffic to a certain subset of users and applications. In order to cope with the increasing demand for new applications, a firewall must be flexible and extensible to support such new applications and their protocols. RSVP is a dynamic signalling protocol, which has been invented to negotiate resource requirements between end systems and a packet-based communication network. In this paper we investigate the interoperation of RSVP with a firewall system in order to support new applications in a generic way. We show how the resulting system flexibility allows for a variety of employment scenarios and incremental deployment of such a technology. We back up our claims by describing a prototype that we have implemented.