Abstract. Modern computer architectures are founded on multi-core processors. In order to efficiently process network traffic, it is necessary to dynamically split high-speed packet streams across cores based on the monitoring goal. Most network adapters are multi-core aware but offer limited facilities for assigning packets to processor cores. In this paper we introduce a hybrid traffic analysis framework that leverages flexible packet balancing mechanisms available on recent 10 Gbit commodity network adapters not yet exploited by operating systems. The main contribution of this paper is an open source hardware-assisted software layer for dynamically configuring packet balancing policies in order to fully exploit multi-core systems and enable 10 Gbit wire-speed network traffic analysis.