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Parallel Firewall Designs For High-Speed Networks

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

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abstract
Firewalls enforce a security policy between two networks by comparing arriving packets against the policy rules to determine if they should be accepted or denied. Unfortunately, security processing imposes significant delays on routing activity in relation to the complexity and size of the policy. These delays become more apparent as network speeds increase and performance requirements heighten. Thus, the need to improve firewall performance will only increase over time. This thesis introduces a novel parallel firewall design, where firewall nodes collectively enforce a security policy. The proposed model can perform inspections under increased traffic loads and higher traffic speeds in a scalable manner. To accomplish this, each parallel firewall node implements a portion of the policy, a form of function parallelism, and packets are processed by all firewall nodes simultaneously, ensuring a packet's exposure to the entire policy. Since each firewall node has fewer rules to process per packet, the proposed function parallel system can achieve significantly lower delays and higher throughput than both non-parallel and data parallel (load-balancing) firewalls. Furthermore, unlike data parallel systems, the new function parallel design allows stateful inspection of packets, a critical component in preventing certain types of network attacks. These advantages will be demonstrated theoretically and empirically through experiments and simulations.
subject
data parallel
firewall
firewalls
function parallel
high speed
high-speed networks
network security
networks
parallel
security
contributor
Farley, Ryan Joseph (author)
Dr. V. Paul Pauca (committee chair)
Dr. Errin W. Fulp (committee member)
Dr. William H. Turkett (committee member)
creator
Farley, Ryan Joseph
date
2008-09-28T10:50:40Z (accessioned)
2010-06-18T18:59:57Z (accessioned)
2007-08-11 (available)
2008-09-28T10:50:40Z (available)
2010-06-18T18:59:57Z (available)
2005-12-08 (issued)
degree
null (defenseDate)
Computer Science (discipline)
Wake Forest University (grantor)
MA (level)
identifier
farleyryanj_12_2005.pdf
http://hdl.handle.net/10339/14906 (uri)
migration
etd-12142005-194043 (oldETDId)
rights
Release the entire work immediately for access worldwide. (accessRights)
I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Wake Forest University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. (license)
title
Parallel Firewall Designs For High-Speed Networks

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