# UPF
Unified Packet Filter - Diploma Thesis Project

What is this about?

UPF is a tool written in C++11 for optimizing packet filter rule sets for 
4 different packet filter engines (iptables, pf, ipfw, ipf) and includes 5 
different optimizations (Two Redundancy Removals, Firewall Compressor, HyperSplit and SAXPAC) 
along with several parameters to tweak the actual result.
The optimizations can result in significant performance improvements and don't
require any changes to the underlying engines whatsoever.

As this is an experimental build, bugs and some minor issues are to be expected
and I can not guarantee UPF to work with every obscure engine specific feature
such as connection tracking. Instead UPF ignores the processing of rules it can 
not identify, so in the current state UPF sticks to basic filtering rules.

UPF also supports synthetic ClassBench rule sets as input and is used by me for
scientific evaluation of the aforementioned optimization's effectiveness.

Along the UPF source, there are also several Python scripts in the evaluation folder
for my evaluation test bench, as well as a Simulator that reads a UPF internal format file 
as well as automatically generated packet traces to determine the matching rules
for each packet in the trace.