SolarSecure™ Filter Engine

At the core of Solarflare’s DDoS attack mitigation you’ll find the SolarSecure™ Filter Engine – a high performance packet filter engine. The SolarSecure Filter Engine uses a pseudo-microcode instruction set to configure the filter engine to selectively accept, reject or rate-limit packets based on packet headers and packet contents. The microcode used for filtering is under user control. So, the filtering behavior is highly configurable and can be customized for particular customer use cases.

The SolarSecure Filter Engine enables “bad” traffic to be detected very early in the network stack, so DDoS attacks can be absorbed without degradation of “good” traffic. The filter engine provides the ability to efficiently block or rate limit packets based on their contents. It is designed to work on large address sets and can scale to configurations with lookups against millions of IP addresses. In addition to network level address matching with associated blocking or rate limiting, the filtering engine supports request-level deep packet inspection. For example, HTTP requests can be inspected and connections aborted dependent on the contents of the HTTP headers.

Packet-Level Filtering

In benchmark testing, a SolarSecure Filter Engine enabled server shows a 3x to 4x improvement in packet-level filtering server headroom over iptables. Server headroom refers to the server’s ability to continue to serve “good” traffic while withstanding a DDoS attack.

Request-Level Filtering

With request-level filtering, the SolarSecure Filter Engine shows an 8x to 10x improvement in server headroom over performing request-level filtering within the webserver. Figures show “good” customer traffic throughput in connections per second, and the degradation in the ability to service this traffic relative to a synthetic DDoS attack or packet-level filtering and request-level filtering.

XENON Solarflare Software SolarSecure
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SolarSecure™ Filter Engine
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Hardware Requirements

SolarSecure™ Filter Engine

SolarSecure Filter Engine is supported on Solarflare Flareon™ SFN7000 series adapters which have the SolarSecure Filter Engine license installed

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Software Requirements

SolarSecure™ Filter Engine

  • Solarflare SolarSecure compatible driver
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 &12

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