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HyPaFilter+: Enhanced Hybrid Packet Filtering using Hardware Assisted Classification and Header Space Analysis

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Fiessler, A 
Lorenz, C 
Hager, S 
Scheuermann, B 
Moore, AW 

Abstract

Firewalls, key components for secured network in- frastructures, are faced with two different kinds of challenges: first, they must be fast enough to classify network packets at line speed, second, their packet processing capabilities should be versatile in order to support complex filtering policies. Unfortu- nately, most existing classification systems do not qualify equally well for both requirements: systems built on special-purpose hardware are fast, but limited in their filtering functionality. In contrast, software filters provide powerful matching semantics, but struggle to meet line speed. This motivates the combination of parallel, yet complexity-limited specialized circuitry with a slower, but versatile software firewall. The key challenge in such a design arises from the dependencies between classification rules due to their relative priorities within the rule set: complex rules requiring software-based processing may be interleaved at arbitrary positions between those where hardware processing is feasible. We therefore discuss approaches for partitioning and transforming rule sets for hybrid packet processing. As a result we propose HyPaFilter+, a hybrid classification system consisting of an FPGA-based hardware matcher and a Linux netfilter firewall, which provides a simple, yet effective hardware/software packet shunting algorithm. Our evaluation shows up to 30-fold throughput gains over software packet processing.

Description

Keywords

packet classification, FPGA hardware accelerator, firewall, header space analysis

Journal Title

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1063-6692
1558-2566

Volume Title

26

Publisher

IEEE
Sponsorship
European Commission Horizon 2020 (H2020) Industrial Leadership (IL) (644866)
We would like to acknowledge the support of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. This work was, in part, supported by the EU Horizon 2020 SSICLOPS project (grant agreement 644866).