Stateful Processing of Network Flows

Modern network traffic processing became a challenging task as there are increasing demands on network security devices. Packet-level processing is not sufficient for advanced network traffic analysis and it is necessary to design processing over entire network flows. Stateful processing in software does not offer enough performance for high-speed networks over 10 Gbps and therefore acceleration in hardware should be utilized. Currently there exists no universal platform for stateful processing in hardware and this task has to be implemented individually. Utilization of such platform significantly speed-up development of stateful network applications. This master thesis analyzes all aspects of stateful network processing platform design. Component based architecture increases platform flexibility and ability to optimize for chosen network applications