A highly secured network with improved network performance in transmission control protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP) is the main aim of this research. The network for checking IP packet filtering rules was designed and analyzed for security aspects using expert system and neural networks. In traditional networks access control lists are processed sequentially. This degrades performance of the network since packets are analyzed one after another. To remedy this performance drawback, we addressed the problem from three different fronts: using an expert system, using parallel processing and using an artificial neural network implementation.