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Network processor acceleration for a Linux* netfilter firewall

Published: 26 October 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Network firewalls occupy a central role in computer security, protecting data, compute, and networking resources while still allowing useful packets to flow. Increases in both the work per network packet and packet rate make it increasingly difficult for general-purpose processor based firewalls to maintain line rate. In a bid to address these evolving requirements we have prototyped a hybrid firewall, using a simple firewall running on a network processor to accelerate a Linux* Netfilter Firewall executing on a general purpose processor. The simple firewall on the network processor provides high rate packet processing for all the packets while the general-purpose processor delivers high rate, full featured firewall processing for those packets that need it. This paper describes the hybrid firewall prototype with a focus on the software created to accelerate Netfilter with a network processor resident firewall. Measurements show our hybrid firewall able to maintain close to 2 Gb/sec line rate for all packet sizes, a significant improvement over the original firewall. We also include the hard won lessons learned while implementing the hybrid firewall.

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  • (2023)Toward Green Access Management for IoT Environments Using eBPF2023 7th International Conference on Internet of Things and Applications (IoT)10.1109/IoT60973.2023.10365378(1-7)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2023
  • (2020)NATRA: Network ACK-Based Traffic Reduction AlgorithmIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2020.29976698(151229-151241)Online publication date: 2020
  • (2019)The Comparison and Verification of Some Efficient Packet Capture and Processing Technologies2019 IEEE Intl Conf on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing, Intl Conf on Pervasive Intelligence and Computing, Intl Conf on Cloud and Big Data Computing, Intl Conf on Cyber Science and Technology Congress (DASC/PiCom/CBDCom/CyberSciTech)10.1109/DASC/PiCom/CBDCom/CyberSciTech.2019.00177(967-973)Online publication date: Aug-2019
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ANCS '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM symposium on Architecture for networking and communications systems
    October 2005
    230 pages
    ISBN:1595930825
    DOI:10.1145/1095890
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 26 October 2005

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    Author Tags

    1. hybrid firewall
    2. netfilter
    3. network firewall
    4. network processor
    5. prototype
    6. throughput

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 88 of 314 submissions, 28%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2023)Toward Green Access Management for IoT Environments Using eBPF2023 7th International Conference on Internet of Things and Applications (IoT)10.1109/IoT60973.2023.10365378(1-7)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2023
    • (2020)NATRA: Network ACK-Based Traffic Reduction AlgorithmIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2020.29976698(151229-151241)Online publication date: 2020
    • (2019)The Comparison and Verification of Some Efficient Packet Capture and Processing Technologies2019 IEEE Intl Conf on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing, Intl Conf on Pervasive Intelligence and Computing, Intl Conf on Cloud and Big Data Computing, Intl Conf on Cyber Science and Technology Congress (DASC/PiCom/CBDCom/CyberSciTech)10.1109/DASC/PiCom/CBDCom/CyberSciTech.2019.00177(967-973)Online publication date: Aug-2019
    • (2017)Hardware/Software Co-Design of an Automotive Embedded FirewallSAE Technical Paper Series10.4271/2017-01-1659Online publication date: 28-Mar-2017
    • (2017)HyPaFilter+IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2017.274969925:6(3655-3669)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2017
    • (2016)HyPaFilterProceedings of the 2016 Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems10.1145/2881025.2881033(25-36)Online publication date: 17-Mar-2016
    • (2015)NFShunt: A Linux firewall with OpenFlow-enabled hardware bypass2015 IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Network (NFV-SDN)10.1109/NFV-SDN.2015.7387413(100-106)Online publication date: Nov-2015
    • (2014)Implementation of IPv4 Reflection Scheme for Linux-Based Storage SystemsInternet of Things, Smart Spaces, and Next Generation Networks and Systems10.1007/978-3-319-10353-2_52(567-576)Online publication date: 2014
    • (2011)The Design and Implementation of Fast Forwarding in Gateway ModelAdvanced Materials Research10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMR.403-408.161403-408(161-168)Online publication date: Nov-2011
    • (2008)A practical approach for building a parallel firewall for ten gigabit Ethernet backbone2008 42nd Annual IEEE International Carnahan Conference on Security Technology10.1109/CCST.2008.4751324(331-338)Online publication date: Oct-2008

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