IEEE Performance Analysis of pfsense in Cyber Defense

An Intelligent Firewall Perspective for the Modern Network Landscape by IEEE

ABSTRACT The primary goal of this research is to evaluate and compare the performance of pfSense as an open-source firewall and routing tool based on FreeBSD, with the enhancements made through machine learning to transform it into a proactive detector of emerging threats. This research utilized empirical testing of pfSense in both hardware and software based virtual environments. The results of this study showed measurable increases in some important network parameters, such as a 14.1% increase in network throughput (from 850 Mbps to 970 Mbps), a 52% decrease in packet loss (from 2.5% to 1.2%), and a 21.9% decrease in network latency (from 10.5 ms to 8.2 ms). While the results of this study identified improvements in both network and security related metrics.Specifically, the threat detection improved by 8% (from 89% to 97%), and the false-positive rates dropped by 44.7% (from 3.8% to 2.1%). In addition, the study evaluated the ability of the pfSense system to detect zero-day attacks and found that it improved by 17.3% (from 78.2% to 91.7%). The study also evaluated the impact of adding machine learning capabilities to the pfSense system and found that there was a significant decrease in the amount of computational resources required to operate the system; specifically, the CPU utilization dropped from 65% to 58%, and memory usage decreased from 72% to 64%. This study discusses how the SHAP and LIME techniques can be implemented into the pfSense architecture to improve transparency and accountability in the decision making process in security. In addition, this study provides a comparison between pfSense and traditional stateful inspection firewalls to demonstrate the differences in flexibility, operational costs, and adaptability to evolving threats. Overall, this study identified real-world, enterprise level problems associated with resource utilization and configuration complexities and demonstrated how pfSense provides a viable and scalable open-source security solution that can address the needs of organizations seeking flexible and adaptable network defense architectures ...