FlowContext: Flexible Platform for Multigigabit Stateful Packet Processing

Network security systems become an essential part of many network structures in both company and university domains. These systems however require a higher semantic level of network traffic analysis like stateful filtration or TCP stream reassembling. This paper deals with an architecture of flexible FlowContext platform capable of stateful processing at multigigabit speeds. It allows to analyze and process incoming network traffic with a flow-based approach rather than packet-based one. The proposed architecture is flexible in supporting wide range of applications, allows performance scalability and state information consistency checking. The advantages and flexibility of proposed platform is demonstrated on several network security applications.