Using NetFPGA to Offload Linux Netfilter Firewall

The bandwidth of network traffic has also increased significantly along with the growth of the Internet bandwidth. Network-intensive application systems, such as web server and realtime streaming server, etc, must be capable of filtering malicious packets in a high traffic environment. However, firewall functions and network applications share common CPU resources for server equipping software-based firewall. Moreover, when incoming packets and firewall rules increase, classifying and filtering tremendous attack traffic require significant CPU time and also affect the quality of network applications. To resolve such problems, this paper proposes a high-speed firewall: NetfilterOffloader firewall implemented in NetFPGA platform, using the NetFPGA to offload the Linux Netfilter firewall and to improve the performance of network applications.