Towards an Efficient Intrusion Detection System for High Speed Networks

Network security and network monitoring are becoming a major concern over high-speed computer networks. During the last decades, network bandwidth has evolved enormously to fulfill the needs of a larger number of users, who want to communicate through an unsecured internet. With the increase in network bandwidth, the probability of network intrusions and attacks are also increased. Consequently, network security is one of the major threats. Among several other solutions, Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is an efficient technique to monitor the Ethernet traffic. In this regard, an efficient multicore design has been proposed for network monitoring using an existing IDS i.e., SNORT. The proposed design constitutes a total of 16 numbers of cores to process Ethernet traffic efficiently. Furthermore, the proposed design achieves an efficient packet capturing using PF_ring with network load balancing based on IP hash load balancing. Based on the aforementioned settings, network monitoring can be improved with “N” times where N is the number of used CPU cores.