SASD: A Self-Adaptive Stateful Decompression Architecture

Abstract

Due to the increasing threats in the current network environment, many researchers have shifted their interests to network content audit, which combines deep packet inspection and natural language processing. However, the performance of network content audit systems is becoming the bottle-neck because of the demand on processing fast growing compressed traffic. While compressed traffic is often split into multiple out-of-order packets for transmission, stateful decompression ensures that the compressed data are processed in a timely manner without waiting for all the compressed traffic to arrive before decompressing. In the meanwhile, hardware innovations lead to new type of devices being invented, which shows promise to fully handle the offloaded traffic for complex calculations at higher throughput than software-based solutions. We consider both software-based and hardware-based solutions for decompressing traffic from network content audit systems and study the workload. We notice that the performance is data-dependant: hardware-based decompression solutions perform better for longer compressed data than software method. On the contrary, software-based decompressing methods are more preferred for the short content in terms of the processing speed. So there is no one-size-fits-all solution. In this paper, we combine the advantages of hardware and software and propose a novel self-adaptive stateful decompression architecture to support fast decompression in accordance with the traffic status and system state. Experiments on real-world traffic show that our proposed architecture can achieve about three times of the data decompression efficiency, compared to the best pure software and hardware algorithm, which can significantly improve the detection efficiency of many network content audit systems.