Rethinking Deep Packet Inspection Design and Deployment in the era of SDN and NFV

Abstract

With the advent of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), the design and deployment of DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) must be reconsidered. The programmability, global visibility and centralized control of SDN, as well as the NFV enabled lightweight service creation and migration, have potential to empower the capability of DPI tools. On the other hand, dynamic environments make the deployment of DPI challenging. Although it has been validated that some security functions like firewall, and Intrusion Detection System (IDS) can be implemented in SDN controllers or NFV, it remains unclear whether or not DPI can be done in the similar way considering its sophisticated interactions with the network traffic packets, especially for the stateful protocols and encrypted traffic. In other words, the design and deployment of DPI in an SDN and NFV architecture would not be as straightforward. Therefore, this paper aims to shed the light on the challenges facing DPI design and deployment in the context of SDN and NFV and propose a solution to overcome them.