C ONTENTS

40

February/March 2009 Volume 7 Number 2

28

FOCUS

Q HIGH-PERFORMANCE NETWORKS

20
Fighting Physics:
A Tough Battle
Jonathan M. Smith,
University of Pennsylvania
What every engineer needs
to know about the speed of
light and network hops.

Network Front-end Processors, Yet Again Mike O’Dell, New Enterprise Associates The history of NFE processors can teach us a lot about writing network stack software.

34

Have Sockets Run Their Course?

George V. Neville-Neil, Consultant

A critical look at the sockets API and what it needs to meet today’s networking demands.

FOCUS

Q WEB SECURITY

40

Security in the Browser Thomas Wadlow, Consultant, and Vlad Gorelik, AVG Browsers are at the heart of the Web experience… and at the heart of many of the Web’s security problems.

46
Cybercrime 2.0:
When the Cloud
Turns Dark
Niels Provos, Moheeb
Abu Rajab, and Panayiotis
Mavrommatis, Google
What are the latest
malware threats and
how can we defend
against them?