A cost-effective anomaly detection system using in-DRAM working set of active flows table

Abstract

In the zettabyte era, per-flow measurement becomes more challenging owing to the growth of both traffic volumes and the number of flows. Also, swiftness of detection of anomalies (e.g., DDoS attack, congestion, link failure, and so on) becomes paramount. For fast and accurate anomaly detection, managing an accurate working set of active flows (WSAF) from massive volumes of packet influxes at line rates is a key challenge. WSAF is usually located in a very fast but expensive memory, such as TCAM or SRAM, and thus the number of entries to be stored is quite limited. To cope with the scalability issue of WSAF, we propose to use In-DRAM WSAF with scales, and put a compact data structure called FlowRegulator in front of WSAF to compensate for DRAM's slow access time by substantially reducing massive influxes to WSAF without compromising measurement accuracy. We prototype and evaluated our system in a large scale real-world experiment (connected to monitoring port of our campus main gateway router for 113 hours, and capturing 122.3 million flows). As one key application, FlowRegulator detected heavy hitters with 99.8% accuracy.