Firewalls are crucial elements in network security, and have been widely deployed in most businesses and institutions for securing private networks. The function of a firewall is to examine each incoming and outgoing packet and decide whether to accept or to discard the packet based on a sequence of rules. Because a firewall may have a large number of rules and the rules often conflict, understanding and analyzing the function of a firewall have been known to be notoriously difficult. An effective way to assist humans in understanding and analyzing the function of a firewall is by issuing firewall queries. An example of a firewall query is "Which computers in the private network can receive packets from a known malicious host in the outside Internet?"
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