Huawei Launches 'AIFW Technical White Paper' on Firewall Upgrades

Shanghai, (ANTARA/PRNewswire) - Huawei launched the ‘Huawei AIFW Technical White Paper’ on 17 September during the HUAWEI CONNECT 2024 event. The publication was introduced during the session ‘Solidifying Network Security Foundations to Safeguard Industrial Intelligence Implementation’, which discussed the core architecture and technology of next-generation AI firewalls (AIFW) to meet security demands in the AI era. Richard Wu, President of Security Product Domain, Huawei Data Communication Product Line, and Jeff Wang, President of Huawei Cyber Security & Privacy Dept, were both in attendance for the launch.

Shifting from Rule-Based to Intent-Based: A New Paradigm in Cybersecurity

The expanding use of LLMs, AI agents, and computing clusters across various industries is altering the cyber threat landscape. Threats such as prompt injection, sensitive data leaks, and the misuse of computing capacity are making conventional rule-matching security systems increasingly limited. This is partly due to rule updates requiring significant time, while the systems’ ability to understand semantic context remains inadequate.

As explained in the white paper, AIFting AIFW combines AI-native hardware, LLMs, and intelligence and security knowledge bases to shift the focus of protection from network traffic to behaviour management. With the ability to comprehensively understand conditions, read semantic context, perform risk reasoning, and recognise intent, AIFW can identify specific AI risks, including DGA domains, prompt injection, and unauthorised content retrieval. This approach shifts defence from being rule-based to intelligence-based, and moves from static policies to autonomous policies to protect AI computing centres, corporate AI agents, and LLM operations.

AI-Native Hardware Foundation: Security Resilience with High Reliability

The white paper outlines the AIFW native hardware architecture, which relies on the synergy between hardware and software. This approach enhances post-quantum cryptography performance, rule matching, and AI inference by up to one order of magnitude. With 99.999% carrier-grade reliability, AIFW utilises hardware separation, software isolation, and engine-level root of trust to enhance resilience and accelerate recovery. This approach also prevents vulnerability exploitation and builds native security immunity. Consequently, core operational activities continue to function even when facing attacks or extreme network failures.

Autonomous Policy and Intelligent Operations: Moving Towards Human-Like Closed-Loop Defence

AIFW also addresses various issues in conventional security operations, such as outdated rules, sub-optimal coordination, and complex management. Through unified security semantics and intelligent reasoning, AIFW is capable of automatically identifying and fixing policy gaps, then dynamically adjusting them to follow service changes. This approach forms a closed-loop mechanism that resembles human processes, ranging from understanding conditions and making decisions to providing responses. As a result, the operational burden handled by companies can be significantly reduced.

Looking ahead, Huawei will continue to work with customers and partners to build a next-generation network security ecosystem that is intelligent, efficient, autonomous, and trustworthy.