An embedded firewall based on network processor

A design of firewall system using Intel IXP425 network processor (NP) based embedded platform is proposed in this paper. Intel IXP425 network processor is a highly integrated processor. It has three network processor engines (NPEs), which offload most of the computational intensive network data operations, and one of its NPE is designed with hardware support for some of the widely used encryption algorithms and hash functions. These features make the embedded platform powerful enough to handle the network data to provide security protection. And the testing results of this embedded firewall show that the system is competent for small office/home office (SOHO) users, even for small to medium enterprise (SME) users.