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Some Historic developments in Network Security cont...

Figure 10: developments in network security - 2000-2006

As can be seen from the growth in bandwidth requirements from 2000-2006, the assessment factors and metrics for any new security model ought to be based on the evolving requirements of the network environment and business applications.

One of the biggest developments over past 5 years is the overall increase in network speed. Business gateways in 2007 commonly reach a bandwidth of 10s of gigabits. Since an IPS is an in-line device, it is the capacity to handle high volumes of traffic passing through the device that is crucial to its efficacy. In other words, performance is one of the key factors upon which to base any assessment metrics. In the IPS market, nearly all the vendors are endevouring to enhance the performance of their products in this area. Recently, for instance, IBM's Internet Security System (ISS) division announced its highest-speed IPS, with a top throughput of 15Gbps.⁸

Such evolution of requirements for different aspects of network security, such as performance, demonstrate that tracing the impact of substantial change driven elements upon security requirements is the right direction to go in seeking the common and standardized development of assessment methodologies for the IPS. Moreover, all the various IPS products share a common need for a universal assessment framework to measure their comparative performance levels and capabilities.

(Further details on the basics of assessment frameworks for the IPS will be discussed in another paper.)

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Notes:

8 IBM. 2007. IBM Internet Security Systems accelerates network performance with new intrusion prevention appliance. Press release, issued 22 May 2007

Xuhua Ji, September 2007

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