Harnessing many-core processors for scalable, highly efficient, and adaptable firewall solutions

Abstract

Many-core processors have become the mainstay of today's computing systems. This fact and their ease of accessibility is now broadening the horizons of computational advances. In this work, we demonstrate the use of many-core processing platforms to provide scalable, efficient, and easily configurable firewall implementations on many-core processors. Our work has made possible, to the best of our knowledge, a first-known pipelined and scalable implementation of a stateful firewall on many-core processors. We discuss the results of our work and highlight areas for future considerations and improvements. Although this work focuses on the firewall as an exemplar network protection tool, the ideas developed apply to other network processing applications like network intrusion detection systems.