Firewall-on-a-chip

• By Patrick Marshall
• Mar 19, 2007

At the RSA Security conference in San Francisco last month, Mistletoe Technologies Inc. of Cupertino, Calif., demonstrated a 2-Gbps virtual private network firewall that uses its custom purpose security processor to shrink the appliance from a 2U rack-mounted box to a single card powered over Ethernet.

The Reloadable Direct eXecution architecture lets the chip do parallel processing more than 10 times faster than a general-purpose chip at a relatively low clock speed of 250 MHz, Mistletoe executives claim. The result is more efficient processing without having to load-balance traffic flows to multiple processors in a server.