The current demand for remote work, remote teaching and video conferencing has brought a surge not only in network traffic, but unfortunately, in the number of attacks as well. Having reliable, safe and secure functionality of various network services has never been more important. Another serious phenomenon that is apparent these days and that must not be discounted is the growing use of artificial intelligence techniques for carrying out network attacks. To combat these attacks, effective protection methods must also utilize artificial intelligence. Hence, we are introducing a specific neural network-based decision procedure that can be considered for application in any flow characteristic-based network-traffic-handling controller. This decision procedure is based on a convolutional neural network that processes the incoming flow characteristics and provides a decision; the procedure can be understood as a firewall rule. The main advantage of this decision procedure is its depiction process, which has the ability to transform the incoming flow characteristics into a graphical structure. Graphical structures are regarded as very efficient data structures for processing by convolutional neural networks. This article’s main contribution consists of the development and improvement of the depiction process using a genetic algorithm. The results presented at the end of the article show that the decision procedure using an optimized depiction process brings significant improvements in comparison to previous experiments.

The paper deals with the software-defined networking concept applied to industrial networks. This innovative concept supports network programmability and dynamic implementation of customized features, including security related ones. In a previous work of the authors, the industrial network protection system (INPS) was designed and implemented. The INPS provides complex security features of various traditional and modern security solutions within a single system. In this paper, the AI module, which is one of the crucial parts of the INPS, is dealt with. In particular, a detailed report focused on the development of the AI module decision function is provided. As a result, an artificial neural network, used for the network traffic evaluation in the AI module, is developed and comprehensively tested.

This paper focuses on the use of the Bison Seeker Algorithm (BSA) in a hybrid genetic programming approach for the supervised machine learning method called symbolic regression. While the basic version of symbolic regression optimizes both the model structure and its parameters, the hybrid version can use genetic programming to find the model structure. Consequently, local learning is used to tune model parameters. Such tuning of parameters represents the lifetime adaptation of individuals. This paper aims to compare the basic version of symbolic regression and hybrid version with the lifetime adaptation of individuals via the Bison Seeker Algorithm. Author also investigates the influence of the Bison Seeker Algorithm on the rate of evolution in the search for function, which fits the given input-output data. The results of the current study support the fact that the local algorithm accelerates evolution, even with a few iterations of a Bison Seeker Algorithm with small populations.