Accelerating Cybersecurity for High-Speed Networks: Developing Defenses with P4 and DPDK

Overview

Network packet processing faces significant performance challenges due to kernel overheads. These issues have become more pronounced with the rapid growth of network traffic, often leading to performance limitations in software-based security appliances. To address these challenges, the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) was developed. DPDK bypasses the kernel and operates directly in user space, offering significant improvements in performance and latency for packet processing tasks. However, DPDK's steep learning curve presents a barrier to entry for developers and network administrators. In recent years, P4 has emerged as a language specifically designed for expressing packet processing data paths. Building on this development, P4-DPDK has been introduced as a new technology that bridges P4 and DPDK. It allows developers to create P4 code which is then translated into a DPDK pipeline, combining the expressiveness of P4 with the performance benefits of DPDK. This workshop aims to provide researchers, students, developers, and practitioners with an introduction to P4-DPDK, followed by hands-on implementation of applications for cyberattack mitigations. The workshop will cover the fundamentals of P4, including P4 building blocks, parser implementation, and match-action tables. It will then progress to cybersecurity applications, such as identifying heavy hitters and mitigating SYN flood and DNS amplification attacks, with 100Gbps traffic rates. Through hands-on experiments, participants will gain practical experience in using P4-DPDK to address common network security challenges.

Audience

The target audience for this tutorial includes Information Technology (IT) professionals and practitioners, network and security students, researchers, and application developers. The tutorial can also be useful for instructors interested in teaching P4 in the classrooms.