One of the effective ways of detecting malicious traffic in computer networks is intrusion detection systems (IDS). Though IDS identify malicious activities in a network, it might be difficult to detect distributed or coordinated attacks because they only have single vantage point. To combat this problem, cooperative intrusion detection system was proposed. In this detection system, nodes exchange attack features or signatures with a view of detecting an attack that has previously been detected by one of the other nodes in the system. Exchanging of attack features is necessary because a zero-day attacks (attacks without known signature) experienced in different locations are not the same. Although this solution enhanced the ability of a single IDS to respond to attacks that have been previously identified by cooperating nodes, malicious activities such as fake data injection, data manipulation or deletion and data consistency are problems threatening this approach. In this paper, we propose a solution that leverages blockchain’s distributive technology, tamper-proof ability and data immutability to detect and prevent malicious activities and solve data consistency problems facing cooperative intrusion detection. Focusing on extraction, storage and distribution stages of cooperative intrusion detection, we develop a blockchain-based solution that securely extracts features or signatures, adds extra verification step, makes storage of these signatures and features distributive and data sharing secured. Performance evaluation of the system with respect to its response time and resistance to the features/signatures injection is presented. The result shows that the proposed solution prevents stored attack features or signature against malicious data injection, manipulation or deletion and has low latency.
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This content will become publicly available on October 12, 2024
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.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2029295
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10471043
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE 14th Annual Ubiquitous Computing, Electronics & Mobile Communications (UEMCON 2023)
- Date Published:
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- ["Blockchain","MainChain, SideChains, P4Chain","AIS","Smart contracts","IDS","P4","Signature"]
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- New York
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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