Ali AlSabeh (University of South Carolina), Elie Kfoury (University of South Carolina), Jorge Crichigno (University of South Carolina) and Elias Bou-Harb (University of Texas at San Antonio)

One of the main roles of the Domain Name System (DNS) is to map domain names to IP addresses. Despite the importance of this function, DNS traffic often passes without being analyzed, thus making the DNS a center of attacks that keep evolving and growing. Software-based mitigation approaches and dedicated state-of-the-art firewalls can become a bottleneck and are subject to saturation attacks, especially in high-speed networks. The emerging P4-programmable data plane can implement a variety of network security mitigation approaches at high-speed rates without disrupting legitimate traffic.

This paper describes a system that relies on programmable switches and their stateful processing capabilities to parse and analyze DNS traffic solely in the data plane, and subsequently apply security policies on domains according to the network administrator. In particular, Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) is leveraged to extract the domain name consisting of any number of labels and hence, apply filtering rules ( e.g., b locking malicious domains). Evaluation results show that the proposed approach can parse more domain labels than any state-of-the-art P4-based approach. Additionally, a significant performance gain is attained when comparing it to a traditional software firewall -pfsense-, in terms of throughput, delay, and packet loss. The resources occupied by the implemented P4 program are minimal, which allows for more security functionalities to be added.

Index Terms—P4-programmable switches, stateful processing, high-speed networks, DNS filtering, DPI.

View More Papers

Work-in-Progress: Towards Browser-Based Consent Management

Gayatri Priyadarsini Kancherla and Abhishek Bichhawat (Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar)

Read More

HARPO: Learning to Subvert Online Behavioral Advertising

Jiang Zhang (University of Southern California), Konstantinos Psounis (University of Southern California), Muhammad Haroon (University of California, Davis), Zubair Shafiq (University of California, Davis)

Read More

F-PKI: Enabling Innovation and Trust Flexibility in the HTTPS...

Laurent Chuat (ETH Zurich), Cyrill Krähenbühl (ETH Zürich), Prateek Mittal (Princeton University), Adrian Perrig (ETH Zurich)

Read More

Fooling the Eyes of Autonomous Vehicles: Robust Physical Adversarial...

Wei Jia (School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology), Zhaojun Lu (School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology), Haichun Zhang (Huazhong University of Science and Technology), Zhenglin Liu (Huazhong University of Science and Technology), Jie Wang (Shenzhen Kaiyuan Internet Security Co., Ltd), Gang Qu (University…

Read More