A High-Performance Invertible Sketch for Network-Wide Superspreader Detection

Abstract

Superspreaders (i.e., hosts with numerous distinct connections) remain severe threats to production networks. How to accurately detect superspreaders in real-time at scale remains a non-trivial yet challenging issue. We present SpreadSketch, an invertible sketch data structure for network-wide superspreader detection with the theoretical guarantees on memory space, performance, and accuracy. SpreadSketch tracks candidate superspreaders and embeds estimated fan-outs in binary hash strings inside small and static memory space, such that multiple SpreadSketch instances can be readily merged to provide a network-wide measurement view for recovering superspreaders and their estimated fan-outs. We present formal theoretical analysis on SpreadSketch in terms of space and time complexities as well as error bounds. We further extend SpreadSketch with a fast and small data structure that filters out the packets of high-frequency connections from sketch processing, so as to improve the update performance of SpreadSketch while maintaining the accuracy guarantees. Trace-driven evaluation shows that SpreadSketch achieves higher accuracy and performance over state-of-the-art sketches and remains accurate in detecting real-world worms and DDoS attacks. Furthermore, we prototype SpreadSketch in P4 and show its feasible deployment in commodity hardware switches.