Astaro Hosts International Netfilter Developer Workshop
Leading Linux developers meet in Karlsruhe, Germany to further develop Linux firewall capabilities
Karlsruhe (Germany), (September 17, 2007) – Astaro Corporation (www.astaro.com), specialist in delivering Unified Threat Management (UTM) security appliances, hosted the fifth International Netfilter Developer Workshop. Developers from 11 countries have converged on Karlsruhe, to ensure Linux-based network security systems are protected against the latest hacker attacks. The primary focus of the workshop, which took place from September 11th to 14th, was to share ideas as well as code, and to make decisions affecting the future of firewalling in the Linux kernel ("netfilter").
The workshop itself was split into two parts. Tuesday and Wednesday consisted of lectures and discussions on new technologies, developments and ideas. Topics included “High Availability for stateful firewalls”, “SIP tracking and its problems”, and “A userspace API for netfilter control”. Linux experts involved in any third party Netfilter related project had the opportunity to come and show their projects during the 3 day workshop. Throughout Thursday and Friday, interested kernel hackers were invited to join a two-day hacking session, coding new features and use parts of Astaro’s QA infrastructure to run performance tests.
Patrick McHardy, Chairman of the workshop and an active Kernel developer and author of HFSC (Hierarchical Fair Service Curve) Linux implementation was also in attendance. Other participants included, Harald Welte, head of the netfilter core team, and David S. Miller, Linux Net-Subsystem Maintainer
Astaro sponsors numerous open source projects, assisting in the development of security tools and promoting general awareness of security issues and available solutions. Online magazine Linux Weekly News reported in February 2007 that Astaro is among the top three contributors to Kernel 2.6.20, the company contributing 15,306 lines of code.
Astaro has financed a number of developer workshops that have brought the open source community together from all over the world and ultimately sped up the development process. Previous netfilter developer workshops have taken place in 2001 (Enschede, NL), 2003 (Budapest, HU), 2004 (Erlangen, GE) and 2005 (Seville, Spain). In 2007, Astaro’s sponsorship included travel costs, accommodations, full event coordination, as well as, providing QA equipment for security and benchmarking tests.
Netfilter is software that provides the packet filtering framework for the Linux kernel inside the Linux 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernel series, currently used in the Astaro Security Gateway. Astaro sponsors two full-time developers on the netfilter core team and makes monetary contributions to the project.
About Astaro
Astaro Corporation is headquartered in Burlington, Mass. and Karlsruhe, Germany. The Astaro Security Gateway, simplifying Email, Web & Network Security, has won numerous industry awards and is protecting over 30,000 networks in 60 countries. Astaro products are distributed by a worldwide network of more than 1,000 solution partners who offer local support and services. For more information, please visit www.astaro.com .
Photographs from the International Netfilter Developer Workshop are available upon request.
Contact
Victor Cruz
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