A Dynamic Strategy to Cache Out-of-Sequence Packet in DPI System

Abstract

As a major approach for a network security system to discover threats or forensics, DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) technique is widely used in monitoring network flow. With the rapid development of Internet bandwidth, DPI system is facing more and more challenges on performance. One of these challenges is that out-of-sequence packets in TCP transmission will greatly affect memory consumption and data-recall. For a large scale DPI system, each DPI node has to monitor a huge amount of TCP session. It will consume too many resources to allocate plenty of space for storing all out-of-sequence packets. Meanwhile, insufficient space for buffer results in dropping packets and thus unable to reassemble network flow. We analyze the out-of-sequence characteristic of different Internet flow, and implement a dynamic strategy to cache out-of-sequence packet, which provide a more flexible way to keep track of the sessions. Experiment shows that based on the new strategy, a DPI system can greatly improve the completeness of data recall with little extra consumption of space.