Method of building a firewall for networked devices

A device operative to perform secure operations in a network including a plurality of devices, comprising:

• a plurality of processor cores;
• a plurality of physical ports to receive packets;
• a system interconnect coupled to the processor cores and the physical ports;
• and
• a network security engine coupled to the processor cores and the physical ports, the network security engine operative to:
• extract a key from a packet received from a physical port among the physical ports;
• in response to a first determination that the key does not match a stored key in the device, block the packet from entering the system interconnect through the physical port;
• and
• in response to the first determination that the key matches the stored key and in response to a second determination that one or more identifiers extracted from the packet do not match stored information in the device, block the packet from entering an identified processor core among the processor cores, wherein the one or more identifiers identify a memory location in the device, and the stored information includes a memory address range allocated to a process executed by the identified processor core for processing the packet.

A system operative to perform secure operations in a network, comprising:

• a plurality of devices;
• and
• a gateway coupled to the devices via the network to manage the devices;
• at least one of the devices further comprising:
• a plurality of processor cores;
• a plurality of physical ports to receive packets;
• a system interconnect coupled to the processor cores and the physical ports;
• and
• a network security engine coupled to the processor cores and the physical ports, the network security engine operative to:
• extract a key from a packet received from a physical port among the physical ports, wherein the key includes a group name identifying a group of the devices;
• in response to a first determination that the key does not match a stored key in the device, block the packet from entering the system interconnect through the physical port;
• and
• in response to the first determination that the key matches the stored key and in response to a second determination that one or more identifiers extracted from the packet do not match stored information in the device, block the packet from entering an identified processor core among the processor cores, wherein the one or more identifiers identify a memory location in the at least one device, and the stored information includes a memory address range allocated to a process executed by the identified processor core for processing the packet.