Improving a network security system by recongurable hardware

Improving network security systems by using recon gurable hardware is an important research eld since the speed of the Internet is increasing. In this work, we have implemented stateful TCP inspection in a Field Programmable Gate Array (EPGA) to help alleviating a bottleneck in network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs). Today´s software based NIDSs (eg. Snort) show inef ciency and even fail to perform for the faster Internet. Implementing stateful TCP inspection in EPGA aims at achieving an ef cient, fast NIDS in general, - Snort speci cally. By dividing a TCP connection into two ows, one to the Sewer and another to the Client, monitoring of the TCP ow can be sped up. A TCP ow deals not only with a single packet but also with multiple packets over the network. Reassembly of those packets is one of the main tusks that the TCP ow monitoring should accomplish. By parallelizing the tasks of reassembling TCP packets on the Sewer and the Client on an EPGA, the performance of stateful TCP inspection can be greatly improved. The performance obtained by this work is a throughput of 2.75 Gbps.