A Powerful Easy-to-use Packet Control
API for Linux
Maninder Singh
Computer Science & Engineering Department
Thapar University
Patiala, India
Email: maninder.tiet@gmail.com
Dr. Maninder Singh
Computer Science & Engineering Department
Thapar University
Patiala, India
Email: msingh@thapar.edu
Abstract—Network security is a fairly vast field and is
of utmost importance to preserve the information. Existing
security solutions like firewalls and IDS implement and support
only limited number of packet control mechanisms at the core
API available to them. Thus options for specifying rules are
rigid. Also, security companies make the kernel buggy as they
customize it to make their own firewall for their product. In
this paper, a new user space API has been proposed which will
provide a consistent, standard and highly flexible packet control
solution for implementing firewalls. The API is consistent in
the way that most of the security applications can use it
without modification. It will also provide a standard way for
the security companies to do customization at the kernel level.
Keywords-packet control; IDS; firewall; network security;
deep packet inspection; consistent API; linux kernel
