INVITED PAPER Joint Special Section on Recent Progress in Optoelectronics and Communications A1 0Gb/s Firewall System for Network Security in Photonic Era

SUMMARY Although the Internet is playing an increasingly signifi- cant role in global communication, it remains vulnerable to malicious traffic such as worms and DoS/DDoS attacks. In the last few years, the emergence of high speed active worms, such as Code Red II, Nimda, SQL Slammer and MS Blaster, has become a serious issue. These worms cause serious damage to communication networks throughout the world by using up net- work bandwidth. In addition, since conventional firewall systems are lo- cated just in front of the server and do not prevent malicious traffic from entering the network, they cannot prevent such network congestion. There- fore, the firewall between domains or between core routers should play important roles in the photonic networks. We have developed a prototype system of a network firewall using reconfigurable processors. In this paper, we overview the developed system and present its evaluation results.