NETWORK INTERFACE AND FIREWALL DEVICE

摘要

A network processing device (25) provides a novel architecture for conducting firewall (18) and other network interface managetmsnt operations (26). In another aspect of the invention, a Unified Policy Management (UPM) architecture uses a same memo (26) and processing structure (25) to integrate firewall policy management with routing and switching decisions. In another embodiment, a Reconfigurable Semantic Processor (RSP) (100) uses a parser to identify different syntactic elements (16, 22) that are then used! by one or more Semantic Processing Units (SPUs) to carry out different firewall, network interface, routing, switching, and other pariket processing operations (24).