研究證實 Biforch 能在不變更既有拓撲的前提下，低成本地協調 L3/L4與L7存取控制，減少人為配置風險，為中小型組織邁向零信任與微分段提供一條「最小侵入」之可行途徑。 ;With the growing adoption of cloud-native technologies and microservice architectures, enterprises increasingly rely on Layer-7 reverse proxies as a single entry point. When security policies must be defined at the service level, however, access rules become fragmented across two tiers of equipment, driving up configuration complexity and, consequently, security risk.
This paper presents Biforch, a framework that introduces a Service-as-Alias model: each service is abstracted as a firewall alias, so access policies can be defined once—at a single firewall interface—then translated and synchronized to every reverse proxy. Thanks to its vendor-neutral Core–Agent design, Biforch supports multiple firewall brands (e.g., FortiGate, OPNsense) as well as mainstream reverse-proxy software.
Stress tests on a modest 1.4 GHz, 1-vCPU platform show that Biforch remains lightweight even when synchronizing hundreds of rules. Theoretical analysis further demonstrates that Biforch requires fewer configuration steps than manual workflows, while concentrating rules in one place and expressing them through semantic aliases that greatly improve readability.
Overall, the study confirms that Biforch can coordinate L3/L4 and L7 access control at low cost—without changing existing network topologies—significantly reducing human-error risk. It therefore offers small- and medium-sized organizations a minimal-intrusion path toward zero-trust security and fine-grained micro-segmentation.
