The July 2019 issue

This July 2019 issue contains two technical papers and three editorial notes. In "Securing Linux with a Faster and Scalable IPtables", Sebastiano Miano and his colleagues revisit how Linux firewalls work. Since version 2.4.0 of the Linux kernel, iptables has been the standard way of defining firewall rules in Linux. These iptables are widely used, but writing and maintaining them can be difficult. Furthermore, they have some limitations in terms of performance. This paper leverages the eBPF virtual machine that is included in the Linux kernel to propose a replacement for iptables that preserves their semantics while providing improved performance. They release their implementation and evaluate its performance in details.