YACA: Yet Another Cluster-Based Architecture for Network Intrusion Prevention

Inline stateful and deep inspection for network intrusion prevention system (NIPS) is progressively challenging to cope with the fast growing volume and ever increasing complexity of network traffic. Traditional cluster-based architectures provide a solution for scalable and high performance NIPS, but with some common limitations. This paper proposed yet another cluster-based architecture (YACA) with a stateful traffic splitter. As an architectural approach for building a high performance NIPS, we present a novel design of stateful traffic splitter. The performance of its network processor implemented prototype demonstrates that such a design is suitable for the proposed architecture.