The Washington University in Saint Louis (WUSL) announced that one of its computer science teams has developed a new technology to stop computer viruses and worms before they reach your system.
John Lockwood and his team didn't use software. Instead, they created an open platform that augments a network with reprogrammable hardware, called the Field-programmable Port Extender (FPX).
Here is a photograph of a FPX module (Credit: FPX group at WUSL).
"The FPX uses several patented technologies in order to scan for the signatures of malware quickly," said Lockwood. "Unlike existing network intrusion systems, the FPX uses hardware, not software, to scan data quickly. The FPX can scan each and every byte of every data packet transmitted through a network at a rate of 2.4 billion bits per second. In other words, the FPX could scan every word in the entire works of Shakespeare in about 1/60th of a second."
How can the system go that fast?
The high speed of the FPX is possible because the logic on the FPX is implemented as Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) circuits, Lockwood explained. These circuits are used to scan and filter Internet traffic for worms and viruses using FPGA circuits that operate in parallel. Lockwood's group has developed and implemented circuits that process the Internet protocol (IP) packets directly in hardware. They also have developed several circuits that rapidly scan streams of data for strings or regular expressions in order to find the signatures of malware carried within the payload of Internet packets.
Will this technology emerge from the lab?
A local St. Louis company, Global Velocity, is building commercial systems that use the FPX technology. The company is working with local companies, international corporations, universities, and the government to make plans to install systems in both local-area and wide-area networks. The device self-integrates easily into existing Gigabit Ethernet or Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks.
Please note that Lockwood is one of the founding members of the company. And read this page for more details about Global Velocity technology.
Lockwood's work has been presented at the Military and Aerospace Programmable Logic Device Conference (MALPD), in September 2003. The abstract of his paper, "Internet Worm and Virus Protection in Dynamically Reconfigurable Hardware," is available here (PDF format, 15KB, 2 pages).
Now, if you want to protect your system, all you have to do is convince your company -- or your spouse -- to buy such a system when it becomes widely available.
Source: Tony Fitzpatrick, Washington University in St. Louis, November 5, 2003; and various other websites
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