For the Department of Energy and large corporations that experience bottlenecks and quality-of-service degradation within their firewall due to ever-increasing network speeds and throughput, escalatingsophistication of attacks, regulatory initiatives, and integration of networks within the enterprise, ourapproach is to develop an advanced firewall methodology with intrusion detection and prevention capabilities that has several significant advantagesover traditional and current load-balancing firewalls and is capable of maintaining an optimized set of firewall rules that further maximizes the performance and better mitigates new security threats.