Design Alternatives for a High-Performance Self-Securing Ethernet Network Interface

This paper presents and evaluates a strategy for integrating the Snort network intrusion detection system into a high-performance programmable Ethernet network interface card (NIC), considering the impact of several possible hardware and software design choices. While currently proposed ASIC, FPGA, and TCAM systems can match incoming string content in real-time, the system proposed also supports the stream reassembly and HTTP content transformation capabilities of Snort. This system, called LineSnort, parallelizes Snort using concurrency across TCP sessions and executes those parallel tasks on multiple low-frequency pipelined RISC processors embedded in the NIC. LineSnort additionally exploits opportunities for intra-session concurrency. The system also includes dedicated hardware for high-bandwidth data transfers and for high-performance string matching.