Alessandro Mulassano
A Novel AI Based Algorithm for Automatic Reordering of Firewall Rules.
Rel. Fulvio Valenza, Daniele Bringhenti, Riccardo Sisto, Gianmarco Bachiorrini. Politecnico di Torino, Corso di laurea magistrale in Cybersecurity, 2025
|
Preview |
PDF (Tesi_di_laurea)
- Tesi
Licenza: Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (4MB) | Preview |
Abstract
Packet filtering firewalls are the backbone of every modern network infrastructure; however, increasing demands for network efficiency pose significant challenges. As security policies grow and evolve in both number and complexity, the order in which rules are organized within the firewall often emerges as a critical performance bottleneck. This thesis tackles the reordering problem with the goal of improving packet processing time while preserving the original security semantics. We frame rule ordering as a sequential decision task and adopt Reinforcement Learning to obtain an adaptive, data-driven reordering that follows live traffic. In particular, we implement a lightweight tabular Q-Learning agent that balances exploration and exploitation and continuously adjusts the relative priority of rules as the distribution of flows changes over time.
Moreover we adopt two deployment variants: the first one is an integrated smart firewall , where the learning agent runs alongside the filtering engine and updates the rule order continuously as packets arrive; the second one is a digital twin composition, in which a learning agent observes the same packet stream in parallel, periodically proposes an optimised permutation of the existing rules, and a conventional firewall enforces decisions
Relatori
Anno Accademico
Tipo di pubblicazione
Numero di pagine
Corso di laurea
Classe di laurea
URI
![]() |
Modifica (riservato agli operatori) |
