Given the diversity of network traffic, current firewall architectures impose severe limitations on network bandwidth. Customers need improved firewall performance and throughput for Virtual Private Networks and multimedia applications as they move to higher performance T3 and Asynchronous Transfer Mode lines. Neither faster firewall processors nor more memory will provide the necessary performance boost. This project will develop a firewall prototype that supports significantly higher bandwidth and reduces latency for multimedia, Virtual Private Networks, and large file transfers. Support for high bandwidth will be achieved by adding security co-processing features in the I/O subsystem. Phase I identified the hardware and software changes that have to be made to enable the firewall to support security co-processing in the I/O subsystem. It was shown that a significant performance boost is achievable without introducing security vulnerabilities. Phase II will construct a prototype firewall using commercially available components. Security filtering software will be developed for multimedia applications, Virtual Private Networks, and file transfer protocol (FTP) in order to demonstrate the expected performance boost.
Commercial Applications and Other Benefits as described by the awardee: Government and industry should benefit from the significant throughput improvement for Virtual Private Networks, multimedia, and large file transfers that would be provided by this scalable firewall. Organizations should be able to take advantage of higher performance networks without sacrificing security.
