Deep Packet Inspection - DPI at The Enterprise Level

DPI At The Enterprise Level

Initially security at the enterprise level was just a perimeter discipline, with a dominant philosophy of keeping unauthorized users out, and shielding authorized users from the outside world. The most frequently used tool for accomplishing this has been a stateful firewall. It can permit fine-grained control of access from the outside world to pre-defined destinations on the internal network, as well as permitting access back to other hosts only if a request to the outside world has been made previously.

Vulnerabilities exist at network layers, however, that are not visible to a stateful firewall. Also, an increase in the use of laptops in enterprise makes it more difficult to prevent threats such as viruses, worms, and spyware from penetrating the corporate network, as many users will connect the laptop to less-secure networks such as home broadband connections or wireless networks in public locations. Firewalls also do not distinguish between permitted and forbidden uses of legitimately-accessed applications. DPI enables IT administrators and security officials to set policies and enforce them at all layers, including the application and user layer to help combat those threats.

Deep Packet Inspection is able to detect a few kinds of buffer overflow attacks.

DPI may be used by enterprise for Data Leak Prevention (DLP). When an e-mail user tries to send a protected file the user may be given information on how to get the proper clearance to send the file.