GreenShield: Optimizing Firewall Configuration for Sustainable Networks

Sustainability is an increasingly critical design feature for modern computer networks. However, green objectives related to energy savings are affected by the application of approximate cybersecurity management techniques. In particular, their impact is evident in distributed firewall configuration, where traditional manual approaches create redundant architectures, leading to avoidable power consumption. This issue has not been addressed by the approaches proposed in literature to automate firewall configuration so far, because their optimization is not focused on network sustainability. Therefore, this paper presents GreenShield as a possible solution that combines security and green-oriented optimization for firewall configuration. Specifically, GreenShield minimizes the power consumption related to firewalls activated in the network while ensuring that the security requested by the network administrator is guaranteed, and the one due to traffic processing by making firewalls to block undesired traffic as near as possible to the sources. The framework implementing GreenShield has undergone experimental tests to assess the provided optimization and its scalability performance.