The Design and Implementation of an Efficient Quaternary Network Flow Watermark Technology

With the increasing demand for network security, because passive traffic analysis technology has the characteristics of low efficiency, high overhead, and susceptibility to interferences, network flow watermark technology has emerged. As an active traffic analysis method, network flow watermark technology can effectively track malicious anonymous communication users and real attackers behind the stepping-stone chain, which has the advantages of high accuracy and low overhead. However, the existing flow watermark codec is embedded in the software, which is only suitable for low-rate or small-sample network traffic. In the face of modern network high-rate data stream (such as 100gbps per port), it has exceeded the software and traditional switch processing power. In order to improve the coding efficiency and processing capacity of network flow watermark, this paper combines flow watermark technology with smart NIC (Network Interface Card), and proposes an efficient quaternary network flow watermark technology, deployed in the switch to form an efficient dynamic watermark mechanism. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the network flow watermark technology can efficiently process high-rate data stream, with higher coding efficiency and good robustness to disturbances.