Next-Generation Firewalls: A Performance-Driven Approach to Contextual Threat Prevention
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15680/IJCTECE.2023.0601003Keywords:
A Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW), Application-Aware Security, Hardware Acceleration, Contextual Threat Prevention, Deep Packet Inspection (DPI)Abstract
The packet-centric inspection procedures of traditional firewalls, which have long been the backbone of business network protection, are unable to deal with the increasing complexity of application-layer threats. Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) include threat intelligence feeds, user identification monitoring, and application-level inspection to provide contextual awareness. Throughput and latency are both negatively impacted by the increased capabilities, especially in heavily populated areas. In order to achieve high throughput while keeping contextual application awareness, this study shows architectural advancements in NGFW systems. The proposed performance-driven NGFW architecture efficiently performs flow classification and deep packet inspection (DPI) without sacrificing contextual accuracy by using hardware acceleration via multi-core processors, ASICs, and FPGA-based flow offloading. Several optimization methods are examined in the paper. These methods include session reassembly caching, AI-assisted rule prioritizing, and flow-based parallelism. Comparisons to conventional software-driven NGFW installations show a 42% increase in throughput and a 37% decrease in latency when tested on business and service provider networks in the real world. These findings demonstrate how adaptive flow management and smart hardware-software co-design allow next-gen firewalls to provide scalable, context-aware threat prevention that is well-suited to contemporary cloud and hybrid setups.
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