RE: High Speed Firewalls

[jfa () sphere com (John F. Appel)]

Henry Baez writes:

> I am doing research on very high speed firewalls.  I mean
> firewalls that
> are right now available that could handle OC3 and higher
> speeds via Gig
> Byte Etherenet cards.

        Stephen Northcutt pointed out at the SANS SNAP conference in DC last
January that right now the bus speeds of the computers can't keep up with
the fastest possible network connections.  We're talking just the raw,
hardware level process of running the packets in from the NIC through the
rest of the hardware for processing, without even considering the actual
processing to the data by whatever OS (even an optimized "embedded" OS) and
application (IDS, firewall, etc.).

        So, I'm inclined to be very skeptical of any vendor or system which claims
to be able to keep up with this kind of pipe.  But I'll be very interested
in seeing what surfaces here...

John

John Appel
Sphere Solutions, Inc.
410-552-4077 x452
jfa () sphere com

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