Implementation of FPGA card in content filtering solutions for securing computer networks

Abstract

The organizations in network-advanced countries confront the problem in real-time data processing because the processing capacity in IT security solutions is under 300 Mbps but network traffic is over 1 Gbps. Up to now, most IT security solutions have been implemented as software type, but they are not considered as an appropriate alternative of processing packets in the mass traffic anymore. Especially, though IT security solutions should catch all the packets on the network, they may lose some important packets related with data security for their software type. This phenomenon results in the low reliability in data security. Recently, FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) cards have been emerged as an alternative in this area. The FPGA, which has been used in the semiconductor manufacturing industry, is used in IT security domain due to low production costs and high performance of data processing in mass traffic. This paper presents a hardware type implementation using FPGA in the content filtering solution to treat mass packets. Also, the result of experiment in the proposed system is introduced. The results are that the performance of the processing packets of this new method is much faster than that of the software type in almost three times. © 2010 ICIC International.