NetSecu: A Collaborative Network Security Platform for In-network Security

Malicious attacks are frequently launched to make specified network service unavailable, compromising end hosts for political or business purpose. Though network security appliances are widely deployed to resist these attacks, there is a lack of dynamic and collaborative platform to flexibly configure and manage all the security elements. In this paper, we present NetSecu, a platform based on Java and Click Router, which can dynamically enable, disable and configure security elements such as firewall, IPS and AV. Furthermore, a collaborate module is implemented to integrate individual NetSecu platform into a Secure Overlay Network, providing collaborative traffic control against DDoS attack. Equipped with collaborate module, NetSecu platforms are organized in a tree hierarchy where each level node is registered to its father node. A Central Management Site acts as the root node for large scale deployment. The policy is distributed from higher level to lower level NetSecu nodes, while security events are aggregated from lower level to higher level. Performance evaluation shows that our NetSecu system can achieve line rate with and without security function. Finally we deploy the NetSecu platform in multiple sites, where our design is fully demonstrated and tested.