Imagine: Massively scalable multi-core security

15.07.2011

As in many other areas of security, the bad guys figured this out first. Using graphics chips (GPUs) instead of CPUs, hackers are able to crunch thousands of passwords, for example, by taking advantage of the GPUs' ability to do matrix and vector manipulation at extreme speeds. Turns out that the mathematics of ray-tracing or perspective-shifting that are used in games are remarkably similar to the math used in cryptography and hash functions like AES and SHA. So the bad guys use graphics chips to make password-cracking supercomputers.

A network of multi-core security appliances would not only have abundant processing capability to do computationally expensive tasks, but it would also leave a lot of spare capacity "out of hours" that will go to waste. That is, unless we take a page from , virtualization and spare-cycle scavenging projects like SETI@Home. The security appliance of the future could be switching workloads (security VMotion, anyone?), acting as a pool of resources for security. Pattern matching IDS sigs in the daytime, then crunching logs and doing correlation perhaps during the night.

A massively scalable multi-core future is coming and it will transform security just like it has data centers, desktops and business intelligence/analytics. What would you do with a 32k-core security device?

in Network World's Wide Area Network section.