Building a High-Performance Unified Threat Management
Appliance
Part I: Hardware Issues
by Mick Johnson
Sensory Networks
More Speed, Threats And Functionality
Network communication is a fact of life for computer users today; working off-line has become almost inconceivable. The Internet pervades our daily life both at home and at work. Of course, the ubiquity of network communication has brought with it correspondingly prevalent threats in the form of viruses, spam, intruders and phishing: the list goes on and on. Whereas it was previously considered sufficient to install a virus-checker on your desktop to consider yourself secure, many businesses today require a multi-layered approach. By providing security checks at both the network gateway and on individual workstations, the risk of a successful attack is much lower. This has led to a huge market for security appliances; a study by IDC research predicted that, by 2007, 80% of all network security solutions will be delivered via a dedicated appliance.
To be effective such devices now have to protect against more and more types of threats. The standard appliance in 2000 delivered primarily firewall and virtual private network (VPN) functions; classifying traffic according to its 5-tuple was considered sufficient for most purposes at the time. As more and more streams of communication open up across the Internet most threats now come higher up the OSI stack. Many applications now tunnel over HTTP or rely on other layer-7 protocols, and any hacker worth his salt can easily split and exploit payloads over multiple packets. Real protection now requires inspecting, decoding and classifying traffic from all OSI layers 2 - 7. Devices that can do so are capable of scanning e-mail and Web traffic as well as processing packet header information. Such devices have been termed unified threat management (UTM) appliances, and the market for such has been predicted by IDC research to overtake that of standard firewall/VPN appliances over the next 5 years, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 48.7%.
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