Acceleration at the edge for supporting SMEs Security: The FORTIKA paradigm

This article presents FORTIKA, an ongoing EU-funded project which is a resilient cyber-security solution that can easily be tailored and adjusted to the versatile and ever changing needs of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). To fulfill its vision, FORTIKA adopts a security-by-design hybrid approach that adequately integrates hardware and software with business needs and behavioral patterns at the individual and organizational levels to introduce an FPGA-powered middleware security layer as an add-on to existing network gateways, orientating small business users to trusted cyber-security services (through FORTIKA's marketplace) packaged in tailored solutions for each enterprise, and further extended to accommodate security intelligence and encourage security-friendly behavioral and organizational changes. Finally, the introduction of a software-defined smart ecosystem in the FORTIKA marketplace provides the feature of a lightweight solution, which offers virtualized security services (with minimum downloading requirements). Users (i.e., SMEs) may utilize a variety of services and share profiling information with the service providers in return for tailored security services aligned with their actual needs. FORTIKA marketplace also functions as a single point of access for the profiling information for each SME. Preliminary evaluation results indicate that users can upload bundles to the marketplace repository in approximately 4 to 5 minutes, download bundles from the FORTIKA marketplace to the gateway in approximately 20 seconds, and deploy them in an average of 4.5 ms.