Erlang Technology has introduced its Power Search Blade (PSB), a standard PCI form factor blade that can be inserted into servers, PCs, switches, and routers to provide hardware assisted content searching and inspection. PSB can be used for applications such as detection and prevention of virus and worm attacks. PSB also provides protection from denial of service (DoS) and port scanning attacks with its dedicated protection engine. Erlang's PSB supports two Gigabit Ethernet ports simultaneously against predefined signatures and traffic patterns.

The vendor notes that several customers are in various deployment stages of PSB and others are in the evaluation stage. While most initial customers are in the security industry, the vendor expects PSB applications to expand into content switching, packet-based billing, URL filtering, Web switching, firewall, IP SECurity (IPSEC), and Secure Socket Layer (SSL)-based systems.

PSB is compatible with Windows and Linux operating systems. Being PCI standard compliant, PSB can be plugged into any PCI-based equipment such as security appliances, networking equipment, PCs, and servers. PSB comes with software interfaces, named PSB Manager and PSB API, for management and integration with third-party software. Via PSB Manager, users are notified of the status of on-going security attacks, signatures matched, and they can also update signatures, and set attack thresholds, all in real time.

PSB supports wire-speed rates while performing detection regardless of the type and length of the packet. It performs matches found anywhere, unanchored in the packet header and payload without any external CPU intervention. PSB can also support up to 1,500 signature patterns. It can be used in a promiscuous mode to monitor network traffic only or can be used in an in-line mode to detect and block undesired packets. PSB also provides statistical information gathered from incoming traffic such as data bandwidth, number of packets, and types of protocol used.