Advanced Deep Packet Inspection & Analysis | GROVF WireHex
The world experiences an exponential upturn in global data traffic. Ultra-low latency and super-fast communications, the future 5G systems and broadband wireless network technologies lead to the transformation of traditional networks to so-called data highways that are capable of transporting gigabytes of data at millisecond latencies. Today more than ever, these networks are supposed to successfully handle diverse forms of traffic, requiring widely different security approaches.
Network intelligence and DPI
Increasing network complexity made it harder for security teams to enforce bandwidth control and imply more efficient threat detection and responsiveness. No matter if it’s the backbone network, the LAN/WAN or datacenter, the understanding of traffic carried on networks and the essence of transported data is equally crucial in order to detect malware activity and handle cyber attacks, to resolve data leakage, to address high application processing time, to monitor unforeseen data flows, etc.
Network awareness serves a large variety of companies, such as Internet service providers, telecom operators, cloud service providers as well as private and public enterprises to enhance network controls and strengthen security.
At the root of intelligent networks lays network analytics with traffic detection capabilities of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI). DPI is basically a packet filtering technology that derives close-grained information in real-time for traffic management practices, network analysis and security. Compared to conventional filtering that only checks packet headers, it offers extra protection by also checking packet content and has the potential to outsmart modern web attacks.
The global market size of DPI is expected to reach US$3.7 billion by 2025. Some trends standing behind this growth are the emergence of industry 4.0 and the growing usage of DPI to enhance automated systems security, the rising popularity of firewalls with DPI and the subsequent integration of conventional firewall technologies with deep packet inspection.
DPI challenges
No big secret for many enterprises that DPI implementation in firewall devices can lead to excessive network bottlenecks and efficiency loss. Furthermore, DPI encounters new challenges brought by high-speed networks as any network technology does.
First of all, Deep packet inspection will negatively affect your network performance by dedicating resources to allow your firewall to manage the processing load. Its on-premise technology is connected to enterprise networks and needs companies to back up traffic from remote users to pass through DPI checkpoints through this packet infrastructure. This causes enormous latency for the vast volume of users and is potentially unfeasible when too many businesses have been pushed to maintain entirely distributed workforces.
Aside from its inherent limitations, DPI hardly keeps up with a high-speed network when it comes to traffic processing. This stems from the fact that DPI servers need ASIC-based decoding and regular expression engines to support 100Gbps+ rates as modern CPUs are not able to handle this in-line.
Organizations wishing to leverage the benefits of DPI, therefore, require extra solutions to improve its functionality and maximize data computing performance.
GROVF WireHex as a solution
Combining network analyzer with firewall and DPI features, GROVF offers WireHex — Deep Packet Inspection & Analysis Tool that achieves exceptional efficiency for the analysis of 200Gbps network traffic with a single server.
Given the data capturing accuracy and the depth of analytics, WireHex enables 200Gbps real-time bandwidth with ~99% data retrieval precision as against the pre-WireHex performance of highly under 10Gbps.
This high level of throughput is reached thanks to the Xilinx FPGA implementation, carrying out the analysis and initial compression of data inside the custom hardware.
Checking the input data against thousands of rules simultaneously, this DPI and Analysis tool also acts as a transparent network device which means the protocol transfers data across the network in a way that is invisible to the users of protocol applications. On top of that, WireHex enables packet blocking based on the rules set by network providers and logs all data into Elasticsearch DB with the Kibana visualization system, ensuring they make the best of the traffic insights.
Whereas certain solutions in the market try to address similar challenges for network infrastructure, WireHex is explicit as a hybrid solution that performs advanced network analysis, DPI and firewalling operations through one FPGA enabled device at a 200Gbps line-rate.
Learn more about the solution.
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