Fuzzy reasoning based Windows Firewall for preventing denial of service attack

Microsoft Windows operating system has the lion's share (approximately 70%), of the operating system (OS) market. A firewall is a native security utility in Microsoft Windows operating system available to all Windows users with most end users apply it as the first line of digital defence. This firewall can be further customised for filtering of network traffic based on user-defined inbound and outbound rules. However, this native Windows Firewall comes with only rudimentary functionality. Therefore, akin to many other firewalls, it cannot be an effective security tool for monitoring and preventing denial of service (DoS) attack. Nonetheless, as a freely available and conventional end user security tool, Windows Firewall with some enhancement may be a very useful security tool for millions of Windows users. This paper presents an intuitive fuzzy reasoning-based native Windows Firewall for monitoring and preventing DoS attacks, which is named FR-WinFirewall. For this FR-WinFirewall, two fuzzy reasoning components are successfully designed, implemented and tested to monitor and prevent the two most severe types of DoS attacks ICMP DoS and UDP DoS. Thus, the addition of fuzzy reasoning system to native Windows Firewall enhances its functionality and make it relatively better than some popular firewalls, which are still not capable of handling DoS attacks. The use of this FR-WinFirewall can also be extended to prevent some other types of DoS attacks.