IDS mailing list archives
RE: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig
From: THolman () toplayer com
Date: Fri, 3 Jun 2005 08:25:07 -0400
A completely agnostic view follows - there are some important points that people are missing out when they're throwing buns at each other... ;) 1) Gigabit performance is irrelevant; it's the packets per second that count. Vendors cheat and claim 1Gb performance based on large packet sizes (not real world), or just add up the sizes of all their interfaces. 2) In PC architecture, the PCI bus is the bottleneck, not the processor. 3) An Intel processor has a large instruction set designed for workstation/server performance and GUI operations, and not for packet processing. 4) An ASIC has a tiny instruction set in comparison, designed for a specific task. So, a 3.2Ghz Intel processor forwarding/processing network traffic is on a par with a 133Mhz ASIC designed to do the same thing. 5) Processors can only do one thing at once. Thus, a networking device with several processors installed in parallel (ASICs OR Intel) is far more effective than a box with a single/dual processor. 6) Hard disks do not slow down performance. They lower reliability as fail all the time (!). RAID would help, but I don't think any security vendor offers a RAID array as an integral part of their appliance, so cut to the chase, get the HDD off the inline unit and place on a separate management machine so we have a reliable distributed architecture that isn't put at risk by HDD failure. On the same note, dual fans and power supplies also need to be considered. 7) Single-processor machines can easily FORWARD 64-byte packets at 'multi-Gig' speeds. They can do this as the processor doesn't have to do anything with them. As soon as you add intensive operations to the packets in question, bearing in mind there is only a single CPU that can only do one thing at once, you introduce LATENCY plus reduce pps performance DRASTICALLY. This is where a parallel processing architecture comes into it's own and takes leaps forward over what a single-CPU box can do. In conclusion: A box with one or two ASICs in is easily outperformed by a PC with the latest Intel processor, fast network cards and a good chunk of memory. However, the PC is more prone to hard disk failure, which is why you should never put one inline if uptime is critical. A box with several ASICs in will outperform ANY PC-based solution, and ANY ASIC solution that relies only on one or two processors. ..and one comment to Ed with respect to McAfee/TippingPoint
both products really don't care if you have every signature and then some on.
Yes they do. If you turn on every signature check with these IPS's, pps performance slows to a mediocre dribble... Inline devices should NOT rely on REGEX signatures - by nature, string searching is very resource intensive and best left to a nice fast offline IDS running on an up-to-date PC platform, where latency is not going to be an issue... Hope this helps - this isn't an all out war ASIC-based vs PC-based, it's a question of architecture and suitability for the job in hand! Cheers, Tim -----Original Message----- From: Palmer, Paul (ISSAtlanta) [mailto:PPalmer () iss net] Sent: 03 June 2005 03:50 To: Ed Gibbs; THolman () toplayer com; prashant () juniper net; focus-ids () securityfocus com Subject: RE: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig Ed, I cannot speak to the example you make with firewalls as I have very little practical experience in that area. However, I do have considerable practical experience with IPS's and I can confidently say that the presence (or absence) of ASIC/FPGA technology in a product actually implies very little about its true performance. For instance, I have a "full" gig switch in my lab from a very respected vendor that try as we might we cannot push more than 600Mb/s through its ports. Yet, we have COTS PCs that can forward 64-byte packets at multi-gig speeds up to the limit of the NIC. That is, the PC architecture is not the bottleneck, it is the ASIC on the NIC! I think you place too much faith in ASICs and FPGAs and grossly underestimate the amount of horsepower and throughput available in the modern PC architecture. You can use both technologies to achieve very high throughputs. You can also use both technologies to produce mediocre throughputs. ASIC/FPGA technology does not preclude the use of a hard drive. Some of the IPS's with ASICs in them have hard drives, some do not. To the best of my knowledge, all of them, hard drive or not, have non-volatile storage that contains sensitive information, so I just do not see the merit in the belief that a lack of hard drive somehow confers increased security. Your conjecture that Intrushield and Unity One can outperform anything built on a PC to date is wrong. This was almost certainly true when those products were first introduced. However, it is no longer true. What I see is that the two technologies are fairly closely matched. One technology will temporarily edge ahead for a while until the next generation of the other technology becomes available. Again your conjecture that "both products really don't care if you have every signature and then some on" is also quite simply wrong. This is fairly straightforward to verify through testing. Paul -----Original Message----- From: Ed Gibbs [mailto:ed () digitalconclave com] Sent: Wednesday, June 01, 2005 6:23 PM To: Palmer, Paul (ISSAtlanta); THolman () toplayer com; prashant () juniper net; focus-ids () securityfocus com Subject: Re: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig Paul, It has been proven over and over again that networking platforms built on the PC architecture does not perform equally to a ASIC/FPGA platform. Netscreen Firewall was a great example of how a ASIC/FPGA product could outperform anything Check Point could provide on Intel (including the Nokia/Check Point PC appliance!), especially with 64-byte UDP packets. IMHO, anyone placing a security device built around the PC architecture "in-line" is asking for trouble. Would you replace your purpose-built Cisco routers with PCs running Linux/Zebra? Of course not. Do you want an appliance with a hard-drive "in-line" on your network. No again. What happens when the H/D crashes, or in the case of financial/government entities, what if the appliance is physically stolen and configuration/alerts/etc, are on that H/D? That's happened. McAfee IntruShield and TippingPoint UnityOne so far have proven performance in gig environments. Both products are built using ASIC/FPGAs and can outperform anything built on a PC to date. There's no compromising by disabling signatures to gain performance - both products really don't care if you have every signature and then some on. -Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: "Palmer, Paul (ISSAtlanta)" <PPalmer () iss net> To: <THolman () toplayer com>; <prashant () juniper net>; <focus-ids () securityfocus com> Sent: Wednesday, June 01, 2005 9:20 AM Subject: RE: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig Tim Holman states:
Agreed - with a system based around PCI / Intel architecture (eg Netscreen IDP, Check Point Interspect/Smart Defense, Cisco 4200, ISS Proventia to name but a few), then it makes sense to turn off various checks to improve performance, but at what cost to security?
This is not a valid conclusion. Whether or not you see performance gains by disabling checks does not correlate with the chipsets used. Some of the products you mentioned show consistent performance regardless of which checks have been enabled. In contrast, some of the "ASIC" technology products DO show significant performance differences depending on which checks are enabled. Anyone making a decision based solely upon the perceived advantages of the advertised technology of the product is likely to be disappointed. Paul -----Original Message----- From: THolman () toplayer com [mailto:THolman () toplayer com] Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2005 6:54 PM To: prashant () juniper net; focus-ids () securityfocus com Subject: RE: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig Hi Prashant, Agreed - with a system based around PCI / Intel architecture (eg Netscreen IDP, Check Point Interspect/Smart Defense, Cisco 4200, ISS Proventia to name but a few), then it makes sense to turn off various checks to improve performance, but at what cost to security? Is it acceptable to turn off vital security features just because the shiny new IPS system that you've just bought cannot handle doing too many things at once? Of course not! ...and to be completely brutal, anyone reading this who comes across such a situation should send this equipment back to the reseller as being unfit for purpose. There are plenty of network IPS's that are designed to do the job in hand with built-in ASIC technology (eg McAfee, TippingPoint and TopLayer) and offer far more punch for the money. There are a whole realm of attacks specifically designed to evade IDS/IPS devices through use of fragments. The theory being that with fragmented traffic, an attack can spread itself across multiple packets, which all get past string search engines that are looking for a complete string, rather than bits of it. With an IDS, this isn't a problem - the IDS can sit to one side, observe the packets coming in, take note once it has seen a stream of fragments and reassembled them, and quite happily spend a couple of seconds catching up with other stuff before it sends alerts about any signature matches it finds in both normal and reassembled traffic. However, with an IPS, you're supposed to be analysing network traffic at line speeds, and you do not have the luxury of hanging around whilst a machine designed for client/server purposes works out whether or not there's an attack concealed within fragments. After all, most fragmented traffic is genuine traffic - you need to let it through. Fragmented traffic is a real security threat that needs addressing, and disabling security measures that take steps to reassemble and verify such traffic will cause a failure of just about any security audit you throw at your network, plus leave you open to litigation if your failure to address such attacks causes a 3rd party loss. Regards, Tim -----Original Message----- From: Prashant Khandelwal [mailto:prashant () juniper net] Sent: 30 May 2005 06:03 To: focus-ids () securityfocus com Subject: RE: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig Adding to this conversation one relevant point would be, Policies which are pushed on the sensor makes big difference in the performance of the box. E.g.: If Fragmentation and reassembly turned off it can be observed that box performs better as it does not need to take care of tiny fragmented packets (In real life having such policies doesn't make any sense). Over all One should know the Claimed performance figures with avg packet size ,What type of traffic was used for achieving that particular performance figure ,What kind of policies were pushed on the sensor. This can really help to know how a particular IPS can fit in your network environment. My 2 cents Cheers Prashant -----Original Message----- From: THolman () toplayer com [mailto:THolman () toplayer com] Sent: Thursday, May 26, 2005 2:17 PM To: focus-ids () securityfocus com Subject: RE: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig Hi Randall, Throughput is unimportant when it comes to choosing an IDS/IPS, and to be honest, a bit of a bun fight when you place two vendors side by side and start scouring their datasheets for practical information. What is important, however, is the number of packets per second the device can process, the maximum number of connections that such a device keeps state for, and last but not least, the latency that such a device will introduce into your network if placed inline. The smaller the packets used in a test, the smaller the performance in terms of megabits. The larger the packets, the bigger the performance in terms of megabits. Unreliable, and totally abused by most vendors on their datasheets. It's quite easy to say 'we support 1000 Mbps', only to say in small print the average packet size is 595 bytes. You only need to search Google for '1000 Mbps 595 bytes' and you'll soon find out what I mean.. ;) The vendor in question, although claiming Gigabit performance, can only setup TCP connections at a rate of 5,000 per second - if you do the math, you'll soon find out that this represents less that TEN MEGABITS per second in 'throughput' terms. Is it ethical to claim Gigabit performance, only for the potential end user to run a number of tests with small packets sizes and find out this is not the case? The moral of the plot is to never trust a datasheet - either thoroughly test the products before purchase, or look toward an independent testing house, such as NSS (www.nss.co.uk), whom have the resources and experience to regularly generate test results that count. At TopLayer, we regularly deploy into Gigabit environments, and encourage the customer to test (using Smartbits, Ixia or Spirent) for piece of mind. Rest assured, each time they do this, we pass with flying colours, and this is what makes us one of the top market leaders in Gigabit IPS solutions. Regards, Tim -----Original Message----- From: Randall Jarrell [mailto:rgj () msn com] Sent: 19 May 2005 16:28 To: focus-ids () securityfocus com Subject: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig Greetings, We are currently evaluating IDS\IPS vendors. We have tried two vendors, whom I will not name unless you ask me, that have made claims that they can handle a Gig of through put but actually start to fail around the 300-500MB range. Could anyone share a success story of a vendor they are using that is handling this type of traffic? Thanks in advance, -RGJ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Test Your IDS Is your IDS deployed correctly? Find out quickly and easily by testing it with real-world attacks from CORE IMPACT. Go to http://www.securityfocus.com/sponsor/CoreSecurity_focus-ids_040708 to learn more. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Test Your IDS Is your IDS deployed correctly? Find out quickly and easily by testing it with real-world attacks from CORE IMPACT. Go to http://www.securityfocus.com/sponsor/CoreSecurity_focus-ids_040708 to learn more. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Test Your IDS Is your IDS deployed correctly? Find out quickly and easily by testing it with real-world attacks from CORE IMPACT. Go to http://www.securityfocus.com/sponsor/CoreSecurity_focus-ids_040708 to learn more. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Test Your IDS Is your IDS deployed correctly? Find out quickly and easily by testing it with real-world attacks from CORE IMPACT. Go to http://www.securityfocus.com/sponsor/CoreSecurity_focus-ids_040708 to learn more. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Test Your IDS Is your IDS deployed correctly? Find out quickly and easily by testing it with real-world attacks from CORE IMPACT. Go to http://www.securityfocus.com/sponsor/CoreSecurity_focus-ids_040708 to learn more. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Test Your IDS Is your IDS deployed correctly? Find out quickly and easily by testing it with real-world attacks from CORE IMPACT. Go to http://www.securityfocus.com/sponsor/CoreSecurity_focus-ids_040708 to learn more. --------------------------------------------------------------------------
Current thread:
- RE: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig, (continued)
- RE: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig Palmer, Paul (ISSAtlanta) (Jun 01)
- Re: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig Ed Gibbs (Jun 04)
- Re: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig Bob Walder (Jun 04)
- Re: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig Bob Walder (Jun 05)
- Re: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig Per Engelbrecht (Jun 01)
- RE: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig Prashant Khandelwal (Jun 01)
- RE: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig THolman (Jun 01)
- Re: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig Peter Schawacker (Jun 01)
- RE: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig Dave Hawkins (Jun 01)
- RE: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig Palmer, Paul (ISSAtlanta) (Jun 04)
- RE: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig THolman (Jun 04)
- Re: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig Ed Gibbs (Jun 04)
- RE: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig Chris Harrington (Jun 06)
- Re: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig Nick Black (Jun 07)
- RE: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig THolman (Jun 04)
- Re: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig Mike Frantzen (Jun 06)
- Re: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig Nick Black (Jun 07)
- Re: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig Mike Frantzen (Jun 06)
- Re: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig Ed Gibbs (Jun 06)
- IPS test criteria (was IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig) Bob Walder (Jun 07)
- RE: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig Gary Halleen (Jun 06)
- RE: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig Hovis, Chris (Jun 07)
(Thread continues...)
- RE: IDS\IPS that can handle one Gig Palmer, Paul (ISSAtlanta) (Jun 01)