A Rule-Based Training for Artificial Neural Network Packet Filtering Firewall

Abstract

The Artificial Neural Network has been used in many network applications, including firewalls. Training process of neural network is very important to define the intelligence of the systems. Many artificial neural network firewalls used direct network packets for training process, which may be difficult to get training samples and may not follow their firewall's policies. This research work proposes a rule-based training for artificial neural network packet filtering firewall. The developed neural network model is trained by generating samples from legacy firewall ruleset. Each rule has been converted to random training samples. All firewall's rules are used to generate the training sample data, rule by rule. The accuracy results show high accuracy with some behavior studies. The number of samples per rule, number of rules and rule style, including default rule and rule-scope effects, have been studied for the best accuracy results. This study also concludes the styles of firewall ruleset for the best accuracy of the proposed system.