Dept of Energy Grant Supports cPacket Breakthroughs in Securing 100 GBPS Networks

09/02/2010

cPacket Networks today announced it has received a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) SBIR program focused on network security and intrusion detection systems for 100 gigabit networks.

ebizQ received the following:

“The transition from 1 gigabit to 10 gigabit networks is well underway and ultra-high-speed 100 gigabit networks are planned for future government infrastructure and critical high security data centers,” says Dr. Rony Kay, president and CEO of cPacket. “Securing the communication in ultra-high-speed networks is a crucial problem, but existing security technologies cannot cope with such speeds. The result is that critical assets are left exposed to malicious attacks.”

---

Join us for SOA & Application Integration in Action Virtual Conference on October 5, 2010. Learn more here.

---

For this reason, the development of technologies that provide effective network security for 100 gigabit networks is of strategic importance to both government and industry. Kay expects that the unique technology being developed under this grant by cPacket will be deployed in emerging 100 gigabit networks to provide “pervasive and effective network security.”

“Ensuring the security of ultra-high speed networks requires inspection of the content of all the network traffic, detecting threats, and making real-time decisions for enforcing security policies at real time,” further explains Kay. “But this is a very demanding task at even 10 gigabits. At 100 gigabits, nothing yet exists.”

cPacket is not new to such challenges. “We are glad to hear that cPacket won the grant because we believe its technology can scale to 100 Gbps and beyond,” says Dr. Robin Sommer, a senior researcher at the U.C. Berkeley-affiliated International Computer Science Institute (ICSI).

Sommer is one of the lead designers of a 10 gigabit network intrusion detection system, or “NIDS” cluster, protecting the network at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).

According to Sommer, their strategy was to divide the intrusion detection workload across a set of commodity PCs running open-source software – hence the term “cluster”. For this approach to work, unique, high-performance frontend hardware is required that can filter the traffic and balance the load across the cluster, while running at full line rate under any traffic conditions.

“In the past cPacket developed a 10 gigabit frontend for LBNL, called a cFlow 10G, and it reliably performs the load balancing in a very scalable way,” Sommer reports.

In the DOE SBIR grant application, cPacket proposed to extend its existing balancing technology to 100 Gbps, and to add novel control elements that would provide flexibility to respond to security threats in real time. That proposal was accepted, and if the DOE approves of the results of the Phase 1 exploration, additional funds will be forthcoming in Phase 2.

cPacket’s flow balancing technology for 10 gigabit networks is commercially available in a family of products, including the cFlow 10G and cVu 320G. In addition cPacket offers products for “pervasive network visibility and control”, which are deployed today in demanding high speed network infrastructure and data centers.

Home
Webinars
Blogs
ebizQ Forum
All Topics
Subscriptions
White Papers
Analyst Corner
Follow us on Twitter
Fan us on Facebook

Explore Our Topics

BPM Strategy
BPM Solutions
Event Processing Strategy
Content-Centric & Collaborative BPM
Process-Centric BPM

About Us
Editorial Submissions
Feedback
FAQ
Advertise With Us
Site Map
Privacy Policy
Unsubscribe