P4Chain: A Multichain Approach for Real-Time Anomaly Traffic Detection in P4 Network

Programming Protocol-independent Packet Processors (P4) is an open-source domain-specific language to aid the data plane devices in programming packet forwarding. It has a variety of constructs optimized for this purpose. With P4, one can program ASICs, PISA chips, FPGAs, and many network devices since the language constructs allow true independence in some aspects that OpenFlow could not support. However, there are some challenges facing this technology. The first challenge is that P4 does not account for malicious traffic detection in the data plane pipeline. 2. The controllers have no secure medium of attack signature exchange. This ongoing work presents a multichain solution for detecting malicious traffic and exchanging attack signatures among controllers. This architecture uses an Artificial Immune System (AIS) based Intrusion Detection System (IDS), which runs on a distributed blockchain network, to introspect the P4 data plane to analyze and detect anomaly traffic flows. This IDS resides on the SideChain smart contracts and constantly monitors the traffic flow at the data planes based on introspection. Once malicious traffic is detected on any SideChain, the signatures are extracted and passed through the signature forwarding node to the MainChain for real-time storage. The malicious signatures are sent to all controllers via the mainchain network. We minimize the congestion the solution can cause to the P4 network by utilizing a load balancer to serve the SideChain. To evaluate the performance, we evaluate the False Positive Rate (FPR), Detection Rate (DR), and Accuracy (ACC) of the IDS. We also compute the execution time, performance overhead, and scalability of the proposed solution.