RevealNet: Distributed Traffic Correlation for Attack Attribution on Programmable Networks

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Singh, Gurjot, Dhanani, Alim, Barradas, Diogo
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866916996827840512
author Singh, Gurjot
Dhanani, Alim
Barradas, Diogo
author_facet Singh, Gurjot
Dhanani, Alim
Barradas, Diogo
contents Network attackers have increasingly resorted to proxy chains, VPNs, and anonymity networks to conceal their activities. To tackle this issue, past research has explored the applicability of traffic correlation techniques to perform attack attribution, i.e., to identify an attacker's true network location. However, current traffic correlation approaches rely on well-provisioned and centralized systems that ingest flows from multiple network probes to compute correlation scores. Unfortunately, this makes correlation efforts scale poorly for large high-speed networks. In this paper, we propose RevealNet, a decentralized framework for attack attribution that orchestrates a fleet of P4-programmable switches to perform traffic correlation. RevealNet builds on a set of correlation primitives inspired by prior work on computing and comparing flow sketches -- compact summaries of flows' key characteristics -- to enable efficient, distributed, in-network traffic correlation. Our evaluation suggests that RevealNet achieves comparable accuracy to centralized attack attribution systems while significantly reducing both the computational complexity and bandwidth overheads imposed by correlation tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_00618
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RevealNet: Distributed Traffic Correlation for Attack Attribution on Programmable Networks
Singh, Gurjot
Dhanani, Alim
Barradas, Diogo
Cryptography and Security
Networking and Internet Architecture
Network attackers have increasingly resorted to proxy chains, VPNs, and anonymity networks to conceal their activities. To tackle this issue, past research has explored the applicability of traffic correlation techniques to perform attack attribution, i.e., to identify an attacker's true network location. However, current traffic correlation approaches rely on well-provisioned and centralized systems that ingest flows from multiple network probes to compute correlation scores. Unfortunately, this makes correlation efforts scale poorly for large high-speed networks. In this paper, we propose RevealNet, a decentralized framework for attack attribution that orchestrates a fleet of P4-programmable switches to perform traffic correlation. RevealNet builds on a set of correlation primitives inspired by prior work on computing and comparing flow sketches -- compact summaries of flows' key characteristics -- to enable efficient, distributed, in-network traffic correlation. Our evaluation suggests that RevealNet achieves comparable accuracy to centralized attack attribution systems while significantly reducing both the computational complexity and bandwidth overheads imposed by correlation tasks.
title RevealNet: Distributed Traffic Correlation for Attack Attribution on Programmable Networks
topic Cryptography and Security
Networking and Internet Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.00618