Re: 10Gbps IPS - what you need to know

[Trygve Aasheim <trygve () pogostick net>]

Sure.

But to clearify; it didn't bring throughput down to 15mbit, but we where 
seeing signatures/filters that started to fail when the traffic was at 
about 15mbit, with less that 2000 sessions.

Now this isn't unusual with an IDS solution that uses pure regex 
signatures. But some IPS vendors claim that their solutions ain't 
running anything near regex, and their performance are way up there...sure.

Many IPS solution has a max latency threshold. So if the IPS uses more 
than X amount of ms before it has analyzed the traffic, the traffic is 
passed through. This is so that the IPS doesn't become a bottleneck 
under heavy load.

But if you have (which many companies does) different service segments 
(like one segment with databases, one with webserver etc) you might end 
up with an IPS where a policy for one segment is a lot of different 
http, https, sql injection, xss signatures/filters that all try to 
analyze the same traffic. Add to these the filters for protecting 
apache, iis, SunOne and so on, and the different version on different 
operating systems - and you end up with one massiv policy if you're in a 
big company.

Then I promiss...gbit performance where all the filters that you really 
want to run are on...fails. NSSlabs are more than welcome to ask for 
more detailed information of course, so that their certifications might 
show more than just throughput with a policy on, but also maybe 
throughput with a policy running, where the policy is actually being 
applied to the data at gbit speed.

The traffic pattern was customer traffic btw. Real world traffic.

T


Ravi Chunduru skrev:
> > We've seen gbit certified solutions starting to fail at 15mbit with <2000
> > sessions during PoC's....
>
> This is really interesting. Can you throw some more light on traffic
> pattern which brings down the performance to 15Mbps?
>
> Ravi
>
> On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 9:16 AM, Trygve Aasheim <trygve () pogostick net> wrote:
> > Another question would be:
> >
> > - How big is the rule base?
> > - Any exceptions
> > - How many filters/signatures/detection features failed to analyze the
> > traffic before the latency treshold was exceeded?
> > - Is the rule base based on a scenario where you for example pretend to
> > protect a windows server and workstation network, and therefor enable all
> > signatures for this - and turn off all *nix signatures? Or the other way
> > around? Or a pure web-/app-/database server network?
> >
> > A lot of these tests fail to test the devices in a "near real world
> > scenario" where the IPS is configured with an adjusted rule base based on
> > typical assets, risks, firewall rules, exceptions, vlan tags etc.
> >
> > We've seen gbit certified solutions starting to fail at 15mbit with <2000
> > sessions during PoC's....
> >
> > T
> >
> > C-Info skrev:
> > > The question I would also ask is was this complete capture or sampling of
> > > the traffic?
> > >
> > > Curt
> > >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: listbounce () securityfocus com [mailto:listbounce () securityfocus com]
> > > On
> > > Behalf Of Addepalli Srini-B22160
> > > Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2009 1:57 PM
> > > To: Ravi Chunduru; rmoy () nsslabs com
> > > Cc: focus-ids () securityfocus com
> > > Subject: RE: 10Gbps IPS - what you need to know
> > >
> > >
> > > Copied from the test report:  "The device ably supported over 11Gbps
> > > of traffic with the larger HTTP response sizes (21KB) and lower
> > > connections per second (5,000 CPS per Gigabit of traffic) found on
> > > typical corporate networks".
> > >
> > > It appears to be some calcualtion mistake!  It comes to around
> > > 820-830Mbps (21Kbytes * 5000 ), not 11Gbps throughput!
> > >
> > > > I think you missed "5000 CPS per gigabit of traffic". Since it is 10G
> > > box, I would assume that there was 50000 CPS in total which gives around
> > > 8.5Gbps. If you add usual overheads TCP header, IP header, Ethernet
> > > header, the total throughput might go beyond 8.5Gbps.
> > >
> > > Regards
> > > Srini