Improving firewall performance using hybrid of optimization algorithms and decision trees classifier

Abstract

One of the primary concerns of governments, corporations, and even individual users is their level of online protection. This is because a large number of attacks target their primary assets. A firewall is a critical tool that almost every organization uses to protect its assets. However, firewalls become less reliable when they deal with large amounts of data. One method for reducing the amount of data and enhancing firewall performance is feature selection. The main aim of this study is to enhance the firewall's performance by proposing a new feature selection method. The proposed feature selection method combines the strengths of Harris Hawks optimization (HHO) and whale optimization algorithm (WOA). Experiments were performed utilizing the NSL-KDD dataset to measure the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experiments employed the decision trees (DTs) as a machine classifier. The experimental results show that the achieved accuracy is 98.46% when using HHO/WOA for feature selection and DT for classification, outperforming the HHO and WOA when used separately for feature selection. The study's findings offer insightful information for researchers and practitioners looking to improve firewall effectiveness and efficiency in defending internet connections against changing threats.