Reducing the impact of traffic sanitization on latency sensitive applications

Abstract

In our modern society the reliance on fast and reliable delivery of large amounts of data is steadily growing as more and more companies and public bodies use data analytics to support their decision processes. At the same time, the rise of the Internet of Things introduces into the public cyberspace a multitude of devices that are often ill-suited to implement strong security measures. For this reason, it is of paramount importance that the whole Internet traffic is fully sanitized from any malicious packet before it is delivered to the destination. Past work has proved that this compelling security requirement may be leveraged to implement an aggressive intrusion detection that may lead to energy savings in the network; however it may also negatively impact latency sensitive applications as the need to scrutinize all the packets may cause latency sensitive traffic to incur unwanted delays beyond the time needed to analyze it for security sake. In this paper, we describe a methodology that, while guaranteeing a full sanitization of the Internet traffic, allows reducing its impact on the delay introduced in latency sensitive traffic.