The software aspect of network security is very vast. It includes firewalls, antivirus, vpn, intrusion detection, and much more. The research development of all security software is not feasible to study at this point. The goal is to obtain a view of where the security software is heading based on emphasis being placed now.
The improvement of the standard security software still remains the same. When new viruses emerge, the antivirus is updated to be able to guard against those threats. This process is the same for firewalls and intrusion detection systems. Many research papers that have been skimmed were based on analyzing attack patterns in order to create smarter security software.
As the security hardware transitions to biometrics, the software also needs to be able to use the information appropriately. Current research is being performed on security software using neural networks. The objective of the research is to use neural networks for the facial recognition software.