Packet Capture and Analysis on MEDINA, A Massively Distributed Network Data Caching Platform

Abstract

Traffic capture and analysis is key to many domains including network management, security and network forensics. Traditionally, it is performed by a dedicated device accessing traffic at a specific point within the network through a link tap or a port of a node mirroring packets. This approach is problematic because the dedicated device must be equipped with a large amount of computation and storage resources to store and analyze packets. Alternatively, in order to achieve scalability, analysis can be performed by a cluster of hosts. However, this is normally located at a remote location with respect to the observation point, hence requiring to move across the network a large volume of captured traffic. To address this problem, this paper presents an algorithm to distribute the task of capturing, processing and storing packets traversing a network across multiple packet forwarding nodes (e.g., IP routers). Essentially, our solution allows individual nodes on the path of a flow to operate on subsets of pa...