Embedded network firewall on FPGA
Date
2010-11
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
ORCID
Type
Degree Level
Masters
Abstract
The Internet has profoundly changed today’s human being life. A variety of information and online services are offered by various companies and organizations via the Internet. Although these services have substantially improved the quality
of life, at the same time they have brought new challenges and difficulties. The information security can be easily tampered by many threats from attackers for different purposes. A catastrophe event can happen when a computer or a computer network is exposed to the Internet without any security protection and an attacker
can compromise the computer or the network resources for destructive intention.
The security issues can be mitigated by setting up a firewall between the inside network and the outside world. A firewall is a software or hardware network device used to enforce the security policy to the inbound and outbound network traffic, either installed on a single host or a network gateway. A packet filtering firewall controls the header field in each network data packet based on its configuration and
permits or denies the data passing thorough the network.
The objective of this thesis is to design a highly customizable hardware packet filtering firewall to be embedded on a network gateway. This firewall has the ability to process the data packets based on: source and destination TCP/UDP port number, source and destination IP address range, source MAC address and combination of source IP address and destination port number. It is capable of accepting configuration changes in real time. An Altera FPGA platform has been used for implementing and evaluating the network firewall.
Description
Keywords
fpga, network security, embedded systems, packet filtering, firewall
Citation
Degree
Master of Science (M.Sc.)
Department
Electrical Engineering
Program
Electrical Engineering