Patent ID: 9497167
Filing Date: 2016-11-15
CPC Classification: H04L

Claim Text:
1. A method, comprising: receiving, by an interface, one or more filtering rules, for filtering communication packets by a multi-stage filtering system that includes multiple filtering units, including at least a front-end filtering unit that performs a first filtering operation on the communication packets based on layer-2 to layer-4 attributes of the communication packets at a request-response transaction level and one or more back-end filtering units that perform a second filtering operation on the communication packets that passed through the first filtering operation, the second filtering operation being based on content extracted from payloads of the filtered communication packets at a level of entire reconstructed packet flows; automatically translating, by a processor, the filtering rules into a set of filtering directives, by at least converting a first filtering rule into both a first filtering directive and a second filtering directive, wherein the first filtering directive instructs the front-end filtering unit to perform the first filtering operation and to communicate the communication packets that passed through the first filtering operation to at least one of the back-end filtering units, wherein the second filtering directive instructs the at least one of the back-end filtering units to perform the second filtering operation on the communication packets that passed through the first filtering operation, and wherein translating the filtering rules further comprises instructing a given filtering unit to mark the communication packets that passed through a given filtering operation of a given filtering directive with respective identifiers of one or more filtering rules from which the given filtering directive was derived; and configuring, by the processor, the multi-stage filtering system to filter the communication packets in accordance with the filtering rules, by configuring the filtering units with the filtering directives.