Patent ID: 7603696

Claim:
An apparatus, including: a master heuristic policy enforcement module associated with a network firewall to control a security state associated with at least one network node; a state machine database coupled to the master heuristic policy enforcement module to store the security state associated with the at least one network node; a remotely manageable network controller located within the at least one network node to communicatively couple to the master heuristic policy enforcement module to selectively re-direct first packets to the network firewall, wherein the remotely manageable network controller is capable of re-directing the first packets without intervention by a network stack associated with an operating system executing on the at least one network node, wherein the remotely manageable network controller comprises a hardware module; a slave heuristic policy enforcement module coupled to the remotely manageable network controller to control the security state associated with the at least one network node; a re-direction state module associated with the remotely manageable network controller to enable the re-direction; and a slave tunneling module coupled to the re-direction state module to encapsulate the first packets for re-direction to the network firewall.