MULTI-GIGABIT PATTERN FOR DATA IN NETWORK SECURITY

In the current scenario network security is emerging the world. Matching large sets of patterns against an incoming stream of data is a fundamental task in several fields such as network security or computational biology. High-speed network intrusion detection systems (IDS) rely on efficient pattern matching techniques to analyze the packet payload and make decisions on the significance of the packet body. However, matching the streaming payload bytes against thousands of patterns at multi-gigabit rates is computationally intensive. Various techniques have been proposed in past but the performance of the system is reducing because of multi-gigabit rates.Pattern matching is a significant issue in intrusion detection systems, but by no means the only one. Handling multi-content rules, reordering, and reassembling incoming packets are also significant for system performance. We present two pattern matching techniques to compare incoming packets against intrusion detection search patterns. The first approach, decoded partial CAM (DpCAM), pre-decodes incoming characters, aligns the decoded data, and performs logical AND on them to produce the match signal for each pattern. The second approach, perfect hashing memory (PHmem), uses perfect hashing to determine a unique memory location that contains the search pattern and a comparison between incoming data and memory output to determine the match. The suggested methods have implemented in vhdl coding and we use Xilinx for synthesis

Multiple pattern matching for network security applications: Acceleration through vectorization (pre-print version)

As both new network attacks emerge and network traffic increases in volume, the need to perform network traffic inspection at high rates is ever increasing. The core of many security applications that inspect network traffic (such as Network Intrusion Detection) is pattern matching. At the same time, pattern matching is a major performance bottleneck for those applications: indeed, it is shown to contribute to more than 70% of the total running time of Intrusion Detection Systems. Although numerous efficient approaches to this problem have been proposed on custom hardware, it is challenging for pattern matching algorithms to gain benefit from the advances in commodity hardware. This becomes even more relevant with the adoption of Network Function Virtualization, that moves network services, such as Network Intrusion Detection, to the cloud, where scaling on commodity hardware is key for performance. In this paper, we tackle the problem of pattern matching and show how to leverage the architecture features found in commodity platforms. We present efficient algorithmic designs that achieve good cache locality and make use of modern vectorization techniques to utilize data parallelism within each core. We first identify properties of pattern matching that make it fit for vectorization and show how to use them in the algorithmic design. Second, we build on an earlier, cache-aware algorithmic design and show how we apply cache-locality combined with SIMD gather instructions to pattern matching. Third, we complement our algorithms with an analytical model that predicts their performance and that can be used to easily evaluate alternative designs. We evaluate our algorithmic design with open data sets of real-world network traffic: Our results on two different platforms, Haswell and Xeon-Phi, show a speedup of 1.8x and 3.6x, respectively, over Direct Filter Classification (DFC), a recently proposed algorithm by Choi et al. for pattern matching exploiting cache locality, and a speedup of more than 2.3x over Aho–Corasick, a widely used algorithm in today\u27s Intrusion Detection Systems. Finally, we utilize highly parallel hardware platforms, evaluate the scalability of our algorithms and compare it to parallel implementations of DFC and Aho–Corasick, achieving processing throughput of up to 45Gbps and close to 2 times higher throughput than Aho–Corasick

Co-Evaluation of Pattern Matching Algorithms on IoT Devices with Embedded GPUs

Pattern matching is an important building block for many security applications, including Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS). As NIDS grow in functionality and complexity, the time overhead and energy consumption of pattern matching become a significant consideration that limits the deployability of such systems, especially on resource-constrained devices.\ua0On the other hand, the emergence of new computing platforms, such as embedded devices with integrated, general-purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), brings new, interesting challenges and opportunities for algorithm design in this setting: how to make use of new architectural features and how to evaluate their effect on algorithm performance. Up to now, work that focuses on pattern matching for such platforms has been limited to specific algorithms in isolation.In this work, we present a systematic and comprehensive benchmark that allows us to co-evaluate both existing and new pattern matching algorithms on heterogeneous devices equipped with embedded GPUs, suitable for medium- to high-level IoT deployments. We evaluate the algorithms on such a heterogeneous device, in close connection with the architectural features of the platform and provide insights on how these features affect the algorithms\u27 behavior. We find that, in our target embedded platform, GPU-based pattern matching algorithms have competitive performance compared to the CPU and consume half as much energy as the CPU-based variants.\ua0Based on these insights, we also propose HYBRID, a new pattern matching approach that efficiently combines techniques from existing approaches and outperforms them by 1.4x, across a range of realistic and synthetic data sets. Our benchmark details the effect of various optimizations, thus providing a path forward to make existing security mechanisms such as NIDS deployable on IoT devices

CONDOR: A Hybrid IDS to Offer Improved Intrusion Detection

Intrusion Detection Systems are an accepted and very useful option to monitor, and detect malicious activities. However, Intrusion Detection Systems have inherent limitations which lead to false positives and false negatives; we propose that combining signature and anomaly based IDSs should be examined. This paper contrasts signature and anomaly-based IDSs, and critiques some proposals about hybrid IDSs with signature and heuristic capabilities, before considering some of their contributions in order to include them as main features of a new hybrid IDS named CONDOR (COmbined Network intrusion Detection ORientate), which is designed to offer superior pattern analysis and anomaly detection by reducing false positive rates and administrator intervention

AI Solutions for MDS: Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Misuse Detection and Localisation in Telecommunication Environments

This report considers the application of Articial Intelligence (AI) techniques to the problem of misuse detection and misuse localisation within telecommunications environments. A broad survey of techniques is provided, that covers inter alia rule based systems, model-based systems, case based reasoning, pattern matching, clustering and feature extraction, articial neural networks, genetic algorithms, arti cial immune systems, agent based systems, data mining and a variety of hybrid approaches. The report then considers the central issue of event correlation, that is at the heart of many misuse detection and localisation systems. The notion of being able to infer misuse by the correlation of individual temporally distributed events within a multiple data stream environment is explored, and a range of techniques, covering model based approaches, `programmed' AI and machine learning paradigms. It is found that, in general, correlation is best achieved via rule based approaches, but that these suffer from a number of drawbacks, such as the difculty of developing and maintaining an appropriate knowledge base, and the lack of ability to generalise from known misuses to new unseen misuses. Two distinct approaches are evident. One attempts to encode knowledge of known misuses, typically within rules, and use this to screen events. This approach cannot generally detect misuses for which it has not been programmed, i.e. it is prone to issuing false negatives. The other attempts to `learn' the features of event patterns that constitute normal behaviour, and, by observing patterns that do not match expected behaviour, detect when a misuse has occurred. This approach is prone to issuing false positives, i.e. inferring misuse from innocent patterns of behaviour that the system was not trained to recognise. Contemporary approaches are seen to favour hybridisation, often combining detection or localisation mechanisms for both abnormal and normal behaviour, the former to capture known cases of misuse, the latter to capture unknown cases. In some systems, these mechanisms even work together to update each other to increase detection rates and lower false positive rates. It is concluded that hybridisation offers the most promising future direction, but that a rule or state based component is likely to remain, being the most natural approach to the correlation of complex events. The challenge, then, is to mitigate the weaknesses of canonical programmed systems such that learning, generalisation and adaptation are more readily facilitated