An Advanced Firewall Rule Matching Algorithm

Abstract

The importance of internal network security has been on the rise due to the demand of businesses in organizations that deal complicated device connections in SCADA networks. Ideally, the firewall rule searching speed must be as effective as O(1) time complexity, to filter all network traffic regardless of the number of fields filtered and the number of firewall rules. This paper proposes an advanced firewall rules matching algorithm with designed hash table function. The proposed firewall rule matching algorithm based on our designed hash table function is able to achieve far better speed than other search algorithms. Additionally, our hash table-based algorithm shows a constant execution time regardless the number of firewall rules.