Hackings using weak points of a website are more and more diverse and leakage incidents of personal information from them are damaging companies, institutions, and even individuals. Lately, the cases where some people infect users’ PC with malicious codes by spreading malicious codes through web are increasing.

The thing which takes charge of this web security is a web application firewall. The web application firewall situated in front of a web server passes normal web traffic and blocks abnormal traffic or attacks. Public institutions, and enterprises which start online business mostly introduce web application firewalls.

Therefore, the domestic web application firewall market is growing at the level of 5% per year. KISA (Korea Internet & Security Agency) announced that the market for web application firewalls this year was about 43 million dollar USD. Especially the web application firewall showed the highest demand in the public sector, more than 30%.

The issues of web firewalls lately can be divided into 3 kinds. The first of thing, it is the performance. In other words, the ability to block hackers’ attempts to infiltrate on the website.

Secondly, it is SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) speed capability. We have met top vendors active in the domestic market and talked about how to respond to each issue and market reaction.

PIOLINK (CEO Cho young-cheol) helps to maximize the use of resources which process web traffic. Yoon dong-kyu, Product manager of WEBFRONT-K, said, “Domestic web application firewalls of other companies cannot help having limits of system performance structurally because of the method that a security software is put on the general appliance. PIOLINK’s web application firewall is a self-developed scanning engine of an exclusive platform for web security, and we slashed the load by transmitting other traffic directly to the web server through high performance switching.”

PIOLINK’s web application firewall sorts only the web traffic and transmits other packets to a server quickly. The sorted web traffic was made to concentrate on a security check only by letting security check carried out through the exclusive engine for web security.

Yoon said, “The exclusive engine for web security helps to use CPU effectively as the web traffic is not concentrated in a specific core because the core load distributed processing technology is applied.” PIOLINK declared that the first half of this year grew 40% from last  year.

For reference, PIOLINK is offering free security managed service to customers purchasing web application firewalls until the end of this year as it celebrates the first anniversary of security managed service.

Yoon dong-kyu said, “As Google or Facebook have changed their entire data to SSL, the percentage of people using SSL as an entire site is increasing in Korea as well. Therefore, SSL traffic comes up a lot.” and “There needs to be a web application firewall that analyzes https well, but actually there is a limit not performing security function properly as domestic companies process it with software.”

PIOLINK equipped hardware accelerators catching SSL and processing well. It quickly analyzes SSL traffic through accelerators and helps maintain a security performance.
Yoon explained, “There are two ways to process SSL, hardware acceleration card and software. Most domestic web application firewalls process it only with software, but PIOLINK can process it with hardware as well as software. This is to increase speed and stability a little more.”

Accordingly, PIOLINK stably deals with up to high key sizes which SSL encryption, software of the web application firewall cannot get on top with. PIOLINK guarantees stability of a server with its own hardware design even if higher key sizes are demanded later.