US Patent 11271904 Identification and adjustment of ineffective firewall rules

Network firewalls operate based on rules that define how a firewall should handle traffic passing through the firewall. At their most basic, firewall rules may indicate that certain network traffic should be denied from passing through a network firewall or indicate that certain network traffic should be allowed to pass through the network firewall. Manners of handling network traffic beyond simply allowing or denying the network traffic may also be defined by the rules. For instance, a rule may indicate that certain network traffic should be routed to a specific system. Thus, if an administrator of a network firewall determines that certain network traffic should be handled in a certain way by a network firewall, the administrator need only implement a firewall rule defining how that network traffic should be handled in the network firewall.