Professor X is an expert in network security. These days, X is planning to build a powerful network firewall, which is called Good Firewall (a.k.a., GFW). Network flows enter in the GFW will be forwarded or dropped according to pre-established forwarding policies.
Basically, a forwarding policy P is a list of IP subnets, {ip_subnet_1, …, ip_subnet_n}. If P is enabled in GFW, a network flow F with source and destination IP address both located in P can be accepted and forwarded by GFW, otherwise F will be dropped by GFW.
You may know that, an IP address is a 32-bit identifier in the Internet, and can be written as four 0~255 decimals. For example, IP address 01111011.00101101.00000110.01001110 can be expressed as 123.45.6.78. An IP subnet is a block of adjacent IP address with the same binary prefix, and can be written as the first IP address in its address block together with the length of common bit prefix. For example, IP subnet 01111011.00101101.00000100.00000000/22 (123.45.4.0/22) is an IP subnet containing 1024 IP addresses, starting from 123.45.4.0 to 123.45.7.255. If an IP address is in the range of an IP subnet, we say that the IP address is located in the IP subnet. And if an IP address is located in any IP subnet(s) in a policy P, we say that the IP address is located in the policy P.
How will you design the GFW, if you take charge of the plan?