Cybersecurity and Networking: NIDS Front-End for Load Balancing at 100 Gigabits

Network Intrusion Detection is a mission critical and computational intensive application that needs to scale for future 100 Gbps networks. Currently, a high speed front end load balancing solution enables LBNL to partition the work load to a cluster of off-the-shelf (commodity) processing elements to achieve 10 Gbps performance. The problem to solve is to scale the performance of the NIDS cluster by an order of magnitude, based on a hardware 100 Gbps front-end load balancing, which operates at line rate and partitions the work load for parallel processing on a cluster of commercially available backend systems. The problem is being addressed by extending the existing cPacket hardware cFlow 10G load balancing solution, which has been successfully deployed at LBNL network for 10 Gbps network links. Scaling to 100 Gbps is achieved by enhancing the underlying hardware algorithmic-fabric pipeline, adapting the glue logic, adding 100 Gbps interfaces, and developing hardware systems for functional and performance testing. Commercial Applications and other benefits: If project carries over to Phase 2 and beyond, it can address general load balancing and scalability needs for distributed applications and modern data centers, which rely on clusters of multi-CPU and multi-core servers. Industry analysts expect that there will be 4 million 100 Gbps switch ports in 2019, for maintaining secure operations and minimize disruptions there must be effective Network Intrusion Detection solution.