Napatech announced a new set of capabilities for its FPGA-based SmartNICs designed to address escalating trends in cybercrime.
The latest upgrade to Napatech’s Link-Inline software enables its programmable SmartNICs to address emerging cybercrime threats through important innovations in network traffic classification and identification. Through standard APIs, security applications specify and update the processing actions to be performed by the SmartNIC, on a per-flow basis. These actions are subsequently performed entirely on the SmartNIC for known flows, freeing up the host CPU to run value-added applications and services.
The Link-Inline software is available now on Napatech SmartNICs that support port configurations including 1, 10, 25, 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet. These security functions achieve 200Gbps throughput on standard servers, supporting the high bandwidth requirements of cloud, enterprise and carrier networks.
To identify and mitigate threats from malicious network traffic, the SmartNICs perform ingress flow classification and identification without host CPU intervention for known flows, based either on policies or on actions dynamically assigned by the security application. Additionally, stateful flow handling in hardware leverages flow-based actions to perform analytics and prevent security exploits.
“The security industry is seeing a trend towards more complex, multi-staged attacks that involve multiple threat types,” said Napatech CMO Jarrod J.S. Siket. “Addressing this emerging threat landscape requires sophisticated security solutions such as the Napatech Link-Inline software running on our high-performance programmable SmartNICs.”