WISDOM is designed to develop advanced optical components necessary for photonic firewalls. This will require the development of novel optical processing modules which will be placed at the front end of the node firewall to provide the primary optical information filtering - operating at wirespeed (40Gbit/s per channel) - which includes operations such as optical packet recognition, interrogation and manipulating data streams incorporating features of parity checking, flag status, and header recognition.

Secondary processing would then be done electronically as is currently the case, but with the benefit of a reduction in the electronic processing capacity required. These photonic firewalls will operate using novel algorithms and protocols, to extract and process wirespeed security information in high capacity multi-channel (Tb/s) networks. The algorithms will combine the functionality of optical processing with secondary electronic security approaches to introduce new layers of security analysis.