Automatic and optimized firewall reconfiguration

The continuous innovation in network softwarization has enabled higher dynamism and responsiveness in creating and deploying complex network configurations. Following this trend, several approaches have been proposed to automate the allocation and configuration of network security functions to satisfy a set of network security policies, describing the security requirements to be fulfilled in the network. In particular, many studies focused on addressing this problem for the packet filtering firewall, as it is the most common firewall technology used in computer networks. However, those proposed techniques for automatic firewall configuration are not optimized for reconfiguring an already deployed network. This results in a computation delay that is incompatible with the needs of modern networks and the timing of current network attacks. In order to overcome these limitations, this paper proposes an efficient method to reduce the computation time for reconfiguration while providing an automated, formally correct, and optimal placement and configuration of the required network security functions. The proposal has undergone validation and evaluation tests, so as to show the achieved improvements in comparison to non-optimized approaches.