A Comparison Of The Resource Requirements Of Snort And Bro In Production Networks
- Authors: Barnett, Richard J , Irwin, Barry V W
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/430040 , vital:72661 , https://www.iadisportal.org/applied-computing-2009-proceedings
- Description: Intrusion Detection is essential in modern networking. However, with the increas-ing load on modern networks, the resource requirements of NIDS are significant. This paper explores and compares the requirements of Snort and Bro, and finds that Snort is more efficient at processing network traffic than Bro. It also finds that both systems are capable of analysing current network loads on commodity hardware, but may be unable to do so for higher bandwidth networks. This is ben-eficial in a South African context due to the increasing international bandwidth that will come online with the launch of the SEACOM Cable, and local projects such as SANREN.
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- Date Issued: 2009
Evaluating text preprocessing to improve compression on maillogs
- Authors: Otten, Fred , Irwin, Barry V W , Thinyane, Hannah
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/430138 , vital:72668 , https://doi.org/10.1145/1632149.1632157
- Description: Maillogs contain important information about mail which has been sent or received. This information can be used for statistical purposes, to help prevent viruses or to help prevent SPAM. In order to satisfy regula-tions and follow good security practices, maillogs need to be monitored and archived. Since there is a large quantity of data, some form of data reduction is necessary. Data compression programs such as gzip and bzip2 are commonly used to reduce the quantity of data. Text preprocessing can be used to aid the compression of English text files. This paper evaluates whether text preprocessing, particularly word replacement, can be used to improve the compression of maillogs. It presents an algorithm for constructing a dictionary for word replacement and provides the results of experiments conducted using the ppmd, gzip, bzip2 and 7zip programs. These tests show that text prepro-cessing improves data compression on maillogs. Improvements of up to 56 percent in compression time and up to 32 percent in compression ratio are achieved. It also shows that a dictionary may be generated and used on other maillogs to yield reductions within half a percent of the results achieved for the maillog used to generate the dictionary.
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- Date Issued: 2009
Extending the NFComms: framework for bulk data transfers
- Authors: Nottingham, Alastair , Irwin, Barry V W
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/430164 , vital:72670 , https://doi.org/10.1145/1632149.1632170
- Description: Packet analysis is an important aspect of network security, which typi-cally relies on a flexible packet filtering system to extrapolate important packet information from each processed packet. Packet analysis is a computationally intensive, highly parallelisable task, and as such, clas-sification of large packet sets, such as those collected by a network tel-escope, can require significant processing time. We wish to improve upon this, through parallel classification on a GPU. In this paper, we first consider the OpenCL architecture and its applicability to packet analy-sis. We then introduce a number of packet demultiplexing and routing algorithms, and finally present a discussion on how some of these techniques may be leveraged within a GPGPU context to improve packet classification speeds.
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- Date Issued: 2009
Performance Effects of Concurrent Virtual Machine Execution in VMware Workstation 6
- Authors: Barnett, Richard J , Irwin, Barry V W
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/429966 , vital:72655 , https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3660-5_56
- Description: The recent trend toward virtualized computing both as a means of serv-er consolidation and as a powerful desktop computing tool has lead into a wide variety of studies into the performance of hypervisor products. This study has investigated the scalability of VMware Workstation 6 on the desktop platform. We present comparative performance results for the concurrent execution of a number of virtual machines. A through statistical analysis of the performance results highlights the perfor-mance trends of different numbers of concurrent virtual machines and concludes that VMware workstation can scale in certain contexts. We find that there are different performance benefits dependant on the ap-plication and that memory intensive applications perform less effective-ly than those applications which are IO intensive. We also find that run-ning concurrent virtual machines offers a significant performance de-crease, but that the drop thereafter is less significant.
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- Date Issued: 2009