Problem Statement
- Firewalls cycle through a rule set sequentially to find a matching rule for a packet being inspected.
- It is evident that not all rules in a rule set match the packet being inspected.
- Traffic is dynamic in nature and rules not matching traffic in a given time could match packets later.
Research Goals
- To investigate if optimizing a firewall rule set offers any gain in inspection time - Firewall throughput.
- To come up with a tool that aids network administrators in optimizing rule sets.
Deliverables
- Comparative results for optimized and naive or un-optimized rule sets to assess performance gain.
- OptAid tool designed to help in rule set optimization.
- Thesis.