Hifn Upgrades MeterFlow

LOS GATOS, Calif. -- Network security and flow classification market leader Hifn(TM) (Nasdaq: HIFN - News) recently released MeterFlow version 6.3, a flow classification software package that recognizes and correlates data flows with their associated applications, which includes visibility to a number of new application protocols that are targeted at solving some of the current problems facing networking vendors.

Classic applications for incorporation of the MeterFlow technology are performance management, including traffic shaping and class-based queuing; firewall classification; SLA verification; billing and mediation systems to account for individual subscriber activity; protocol/application level traffic monitoring and analysis.

In addition to supporting Firewall ACL policies and IDS protocol anomaly detection for security applications, some MeterFlow customers find the Hifn technology useful for DiffServ QoS assignment and VJ header compression. Both of these techniques can be used to ensure all critical voice & video content are prioritized through bandwidth constricted and long-latency satellite or wireless WAN connections in performance shaping or monitoring applications.

"This new version of MeterFlow is targeted at emerging applications that are gaining the most attention and are growing the fastest in terms of network capacity," said Mark Vondemkamp, product line director at Hifn, Inc. "For example, VOIP, streaming media, peer to peer networking protocols, and the Instant Messenger category are those that require visibility whether it be simply for filtering, service level monitoring or for instituting QOS provisioning."

Version 7.0, to be released in the third calendar quarter of 2004, will add full support for IPv6 stateful analysis classification. This means it will not only recognize and classify IPv6 flows but also identify and correctly classify those applications running over IPv6. Certain applications require the adoption of IPv6 much earlier than others. For example, VOIP and wireless networking equipment manufacturers are developing solutions that incorporate IPv6 now. In other cases, network infrastructure devices are being implemented with IPv4 and IPv6 capabilities and classifying and handling the traffic differently may be desired.

MeterFlow's patented technology is used by OEMs to embellish their own solutions and product offerings by offering greater visibility to more application information thereby making the vendor solution more robust and differentiated. Systems such as firewalls, NAT (Network Address Translation) devices, intrusion detection systems and policy-based management tools can benefit from the application-aware, deep packet classification information and services that MeterFlow provides. Applications currently requiring specialized equipment or being held back from wider Internet deployment due to a lack of classification tools include teleconferencing, streaming media, VoIP, and a number of others that are precluded from passing through corporate firewalls.

MeterFlow returns stateful deep packet classification results in real time, which means that it evaluates each and every packet while preserving context information relative to the flow and to other packets. Unlike existing packet classification technologies, MeterFlow extensively analyzes application-specific data in real time, allowing it to determine the content and identify the application of a single packet as well as the relationships between packets. The method employed by MeterFlow allows it to follow connection and transaction workflows utilized by the most complex protocols and applications, such as H323, HTTP, SIP, and RTSP.

Hifn Inc.