Enhanced Particle Swarm Optimization-Based Approach to Firewall Optimal Rule Reordering

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Firewalls are required to ensure that only trustworthy packets are sent back and forth across the network in order to provide secure network communication. Firewalls employ the rules that network administrators establish to control which packets are allowed access to an organization’s private network in order to enforce security regulations. By classifying packets, network devices can determine how incoming packets behave. A greater communication delay is caused by a higher rule count since it is achieved by a linear search on a list of categorisation rules. The goal of Optimal Rule Ordering (ORO), a generalisation of the issue where the latency is minimised while keeping the classification strategy, is to find the optimal rule sequence. This research suggests a dual approach for reordering the firewall rules using optimization. This research suggests a dual approach for reordering the firewall rules using optimization. In the first approach, the firewall rules are arranged according to the precedence relation using a probability-based algorithm. The firewall rules are then rearranged using the optimization-based technology known as Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Firewalls may be optimized to function better and filter packets more effectively by fine-tuning their rules. The performance analysis of the proposed method is extended by looking at the results obtained using a precise optimization strategy. This study presents a method for rearranging more complex scenarios that work better. The proposed method consists of two algorithms: the first finds the ideal firewall rule order using a probability-based approach, and the second finds the optimal solution using a PSO: i) An ideal firewall rule order via a probability-based approach, and ii) An optimal solution using a PSO-based approach.