What it is
AI-assisted firewall auditing uses AI to perform the heavy lifting of a firewall audit — reading the configuration, reconstructing effective access, identifying risky patterns and generating remediation — while keeping a human in the loop to validate and decide.
It sits between two extremes: the slow, inconsistent manual audit, and the naive idea of fully autonomous security. It takes the best of both: automated thoroughness with human judgment.
How it works
- The configuration is exported and parsed into a structured model
- AI reconstructs the effective policy and evaluates it against best practice
- Findings are identified, explained in plain language and ranked by risk
- Specific remediation is generated for each finding
- A human reviews, applies context and decides what to act on
- Changes are made and the audit re-run to verify and track progress
Benefits over traditional auditing
- Speed: minutes instead of days per device
- Consistency: the same baseline applied every time
- Coverage: feasible to audit after every change, not annually
- Clarity: plain-language explanations and concrete fixes
- Evidence: documented reports generated automatically
Keeping humans in the loop
The 'assisted' in AI-assisted auditing is deliberate. AI handles the comprehensive, repetitive analysis, but humans retain control over decisions — especially the contextual calls about business need, acceptable risk and change timing.
FirewallScan embodies this model for FortiGate: it produces a thorough, prioritized, explained audit that an engineer reviews and acts on, combining automated rigor with expert judgment.