Information is one of the key warfighting resources of the 21st century as evidenced by the emphasis placed on ubiquitous communication strategies such as the Global Information Grid (GIG) initiated in 2004. However, the equipment, applications and networks comprising the Department of Defenses information systems has been evolving without direct coordination for a half century, resulting in pockets of incompatibilities at all network layers. These technological issues are further complicated by geographical and organizational realignments that create the need for groups to share information worldwide in real-time. The rapid worldwide expansion of the public internet (and the underlying data transport backbones that make it possible) provides transport resources to support Department of Defense (DoD) service communication needs. This results in multiple clients, service providers and infrastructure owners coming into play to enable end-to-end data transport. Each of these entities have independent network management and security policies that often result in blocking certain protocols and data types, especially those that are proprietary or uncommon or which may in some way resemble security threats. Brushfire Technologies proposes to provide a tool to detect and overcome these network transport problems using our revolutionary FireBreak architecture.
Benefits: Commercial networks face many of the same problems defined in the SBIR solicitation. While the commercial user may have more freedom to change providers or alter their applications, such changes often detract from primary business goals. The proposed solution will provide an alternative tool for businesses to resolve transport and application layer problems beyond the tools that are available today. This addition to the original FireBreak portfolio of features will create an incremental market, potentially acclerating FireBreak's acceptance in the local area network security market.
Keywords: protocol analysis, local area network security, intrusion detection system, intrusion protection system, stateful inspection firewall
