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Packet pre-filtering for network intrusion detection

Published: 03 December 2006 Publication History

Abstract

As Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS)utilize more complex syntax to efficiently describe complex attacks, their processing requirements increase rapidly. Hardware and, even more, software platforms face difficulties in keeping up with the computationally intensive IDS tasks, and face overheads that can substantially diminish performance.In this paper we introduce a packet pre-filtering approach as a means to resolve, or at least alleviate, the increasing needs of current and future intrusion detection systems. We observe that it is very rare for a single incoming packet to fully or partially match more than a few tens of IDS rules. We capitalize on this observation selecting a small portion from each IDS rule to be matched in the pre-filtering step. The result of this partial match is a small subset of rules that are candidates for a full match. Given this pruned set of rules that can apply to a packet, a second-stage, full-match engine can sustain higher throughput.We use DefCon traces and recent Snort IDS rule-set,and show that matching the header and up to an 8-character prefix for each payload rule on each incoming packet can determine that on average 1.8 rules may apply on each packet, while the maximum number of rules to be checked across all packets is 32. Effectively, packet pre-filtering prevents matching at least 99%of the SNORT rules per packet and as a result minimizes processing and improves the scalability of the system. We also propose and evaluate the cost and performance of a reconfigurable architecture that uses multiple processing engines in order to exploit the benefits of pre-filtering.

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  • (2023)Cortex-inspired ensemble based network intrusion detection systemNeural Computing and Applications10.1007/s00521-023-08561-635:21(15415-15428)Online publication date: 11-Apr-2023
  • (2023)Network Traffic Analysis and Control by Application of Machine LearningArtificial Intelligence Application in Networks and Systems10.1007/978-3-031-35314-7_35(390-399)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2023
  • (2022)Enhancing blockchain-based filtration mechanism via IPFS for collaborative intrusion detection in IoT networksJournal of Systems Architecture10.1016/j.sysarc.2022.102510127(102510)Online publication date: Jun-2022
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ANCS '06: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM/IEEE symposium on Architecture for networking and communications systems
    December 2006
    202 pages
    ISBN:1595935800
    DOI:10.1145/1185347
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 03 December 2006

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    Author Tags

    1. intrusion detection
    2. packet inspection
    3. packet pre-filtering

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    View all
    • (2023)Cortex-inspired ensemble based network intrusion detection systemNeural Computing and Applications10.1007/s00521-023-08561-635:21(15415-15428)Online publication date: 11-Apr-2023
    • (2023)Network Traffic Analysis and Control by Application of Machine LearningArtificial Intelligence Application in Networks and Systems10.1007/978-3-031-35314-7_35(390-399)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2023
    • (2022)Enhancing blockchain-based filtration mechanism via IPFS for collaborative intrusion detection in IoT networksJournal of Systems Architecture10.1016/j.sysarc.2022.102510127(102510)Online publication date: Jun-2022
    • (2021)FPGA Implementation of Computer Network Security Protection with Machine Learning2021 IEEE 32nd International Conference on Microelectronics (MIEL)10.1109/MIEL52794.2021.9569201(263-266)Online publication date: 12-Sep-2021
    • (2021)Anomaly‐based intrusion detection systemsTransactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies10.1002/ett.424032:4Online publication date: 5-Apr-2021
    • (2020)Towards blockchain-enabled single character frequency-based exclusive signature matching in IoT-assisted smart citiesJournal of Parallel and Distributed Computing10.1016/j.jpdc.2020.05.013Online publication date: Jun-2020
    • (2018)Cyber security challenges: An efficient intrusion detection system design2018 International Young Engineers Forum (YEF-ECE)10.1109/YEF-ECE.2018.8368933(19-24)Online publication date: May-2018
    • (2017)Towards Effective Trust-Based Packet Filtering in Collaborative Network EnvironmentsIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2017.266489314:1(233-245)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2017
    • (2015)Search acceleration in preprocessing mechanism of network intrusion detection systems using graphics processors2015 7th Conference on Information and Knowledge Technology (IKT)10.1109/IKT.2015.7288744(1-5)Online publication date: May-2015
    • (2014)Adaptive blacklist-based packet filter with a statistic-based approach in network intrusion detectionJournal of Network and Computer Applications10.5555/3170014.317017039:C(83-92)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2014
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