International Business Machines Corporation

Gregory Lyle Galloway

Paul Coccoli

Cheng-Ta Lee

Ming-Hsun Wu

Steven Ashley Mazur

Rick M F Wu

Chih-Wen Chao

David Allen Dennerline

Ronald B Williams

Wei-Shiau Suen

John William Court

Matthew Joseph Kubilus

Joseph Karl Vossen

A network appliance is configured to provide inline traffic inspection for all flow through the device, to selectively intercept based on traffic content or policy, and to modify intercepted traffic content, all without connection termination and re-origination. Content modification may involve substitution of traffic content with smaller or larger content, in which case the device provides appropriate sequence number translations for acknowledgements to the endpoints. This streaming rewrite may occur on a byte-at-a-time basis, while keeping the session alive and without a need to proxy it. The appliance enables transmitted TCP data to be modified inline and then reliably delivered without the overhead of forwarding packets through a full-blown TCP stack. Rather, the approach relies upon an initiator entity's TCP stack for congestion control, as well as the receiving entity's re-transmission behavior to determine how the device manages packets internally.

Transparent inline content inspection and modification in a TCP session

Disclosed is a method of customizing an appliance. The method includes steps of pre-storing a public key in the appliance; connecting the appliance to an external storage device; and booting up the appliance to automatically proceed with the following customization process: obtaining a customization file from the external storage device; authenticating the customization file with the public key; and executing customization with the customization file if the authentication succeeds.

Managing the customizing of appliances

Methods and systems for high-availability data processing include detecting, at a first data processing system, a change in link state between the first data processing system and a second data processing system. A link state between the first data processing system and a third data processing system is changed responsive to the detection in accordance with a first high availability policy stored at the first data processing system. An identifier of the first data processing system is changed in accordance with the first high availability policy to conform to a second high availability policy stored at the first data processing system. The detection, change of the link state, and change of the identifier are repeated in accordance with the second high availability policy.

High availability in packet processing for high-speed networks

A network-based appliance includes a mechanism to intercept, decrypt and inspect secure network traffic flowing over SSL/TLS between a client and a server. The mechanism responds to detection of a session initiation request message from the client, the message being received following establishment of a TCP connection between the client and server. The mechanism responds by holding the session initiation request message, preferably by creating a fake socket to a local process, and then diverting the request message over that socket. The TCP connection is then terminated, and the mechanism initiates a new session in initiation request message, all while the original session initiation request message continues to be held. The server responds with its server certificate, which is then used by the mechanism to generate a new server certificate. The new server certificate is then returned to the requesting client as the response to the session initiation request message.

Intercepting, decrypting and inspecting traffic over an encrypted channel

Growing community of inventors

Cumming, GA, United States of America

Gregory Lyle Galloway