Hardware-software hybrid packet processing for intrusion detection systems

Abstract

Security is a major issue in today's communication networks. Designing Network Intrusion Detection systems (NIDS) calls for high performance circuits in order to keep up with the rising data rates. Offloading software processing to hardware realizations is not an economically viable solution and hence hardware-software based hybrid solutions for the NIDS scenario are discussed in literature. By deploying processing on both hardware and software cores simultaneously by using a novel Intelligent Rule Parsing algorithm, we aim to minimize the number of packets whose waiting time is greater than a predefined threshold. This fairness criterion implicitly ensures in obtaining a higher throughput as depicted by our results. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.