A query unit for the IPSec databases

IPSec is a suite of protocols that adds security to communications at the IP level. Protocols within IPSec make extensive use of two databases, namely the Security Policy Database (SPD) and the Security Association Database (SAD). The ability to query the SPD quickly is fundamental as this operation needs to be done for each incoming or outgoing IP packet, even if no IPSec processing needs to be applied on it. This may easily result in millions of query per second in gigabit networks. Since the databases may be of several thousands of records on large secure gateways, a dedicated hardware solution is needed to support high throughput. In this paper we discuss an architecture for these query units, we propose different query methods for the two databases, and we compare them through simulation. Two different versions of the architecture are presented: the basic version is modified to support multithreading. As shown by the simulations, this technique is very effective in this case. The architecture that supports multithreading allows for 11 million queries per second in the best case.