Accelerating Suricata with DPDK Prefilters: 386 Days Later

DPDK, Suricon, Suricata, Packet Metadata, Acceleration, IDS, IPS, Flow Bypass

Last year, there has been a talk that presented an introduction to the DPDK support in Suricata. It also presented a vision of what a future DPDK integration into Suricata can look like. The vision consisted of a small program, Prefilter, placed in between NICs and Suricata. Prefilter, responsible for Suricata acceleration, could either reduce the incoming traffic or add metadata to the incoming packets. It also provides a vendor-independent option for Suricata development.
This talk brings an update on how the vision is becoming a reality. After a quick refresh of the vision, the talk presents current Prefilter architecture with already existing Prefilter features such as inter-process communication or an asynchronous bypass. But most importantly, the talk also presents the results of the first experiments.