Viable Protection of High-Performance Networks through Hardware/Software Co-Design.

Commercial as well as scientific networks have increased tremendously in speed over the last years. However, in today's world, such fast networks also expose sites to incessant network attacks like theft of information, parasitic resource consumption, or suffering from (or participating in) denial-of-service (DOS) attacks. Some of the most powerful networks today remain particularly hard to defend: the 100G environments and backbones that facilitate modern data-intensive sciences (physics, medicine, climate research, etc.) prove very sensitive to the slightest disturbances. We offer a security solution for these environments, which cannot use turn-key classical solutions like firewalls or intrusion detection systems, as they cannot operate reliably at the necessary speeds. We present the design of a novel, comprehensive framework that aims to integrate software and hardware to enable economical protection of critical high-performance networks. We also argue for taking a more holistic viewpoint of the capabilities and problems that can be solved by software defined networks.