A Feature-Rich Embedded NIDS with eBPF/XDP: Detector and Architecture Trade-offs
eBPF/XDP-based NIDS with Isolation Forest reaches 0.965 live F1 on DDoS replay; gRPC microservices match monolithic accuracy within 2ms overhead.
The paper presents a DDoS-focused network intrusion detection system for transport networks built with Ericsson, combining a statistical baseline with an Isolation Forest trained on flow features from GoFlowMeter, an open-source Go implementation of CICFlowMeter, plus eBPF/XDP kernel-level traffic filtering. On a Raspberry Pi 5 testbed replaying CIC-DDoS2019 as real traffic, the Isolation Forest achieves 0.965 recall/F1 live in the monolithic variant, catching low-volume attack windows the baseline misses. gRPC microservices nearly match monolithic accuracy adding under 2ms per window, while the Kafka pipeline trails by roughly nine percentage points and adds about 27ms.
- Isolation Forest over GoFlowMeter features reaches 0.965 live F1, beating statistical baseline
- eBPF/XDP filters real traffic at the kernel level
- gRPC transport matches monolithic accuracy within 2ms; Kafka trails ~9 points at ~27ms
- Deployments evaluated on Raspberry Pi 5 replaying CIC-DDoS2019 dataset
Full article243 words · extracted from arxiv.org · click to collapse
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks remain a serious threat to transport networks, with recent attack volumes exceeding 30 Tbps, and the telecommunications industry being the main target. Recent work has yet to study the impact of the hosting software architecture on network monitoring solutions, or to assess recent algorithms for improving attack detection. This paper presents a Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) for DDoS detection in transport networks, developed in collaboration with Ericsson. Building on a statistical baseline, we improve detection effectiveness with an Isolation Forest trained on a wider set of flow features, extracted by GoFlowMeter, our open-source Go implementation of CICFlowMeter, and we integrate eBPF/XDP so that the NIDS filters real traffic at the kernel level. We further compare three deployments, monolithic, Kafka-based, and gRPC-based microservices, on a Raspberry Pi 5 testbed replaying the CIC-DDoS2019 dataset as real network traffic. Detection quality is governed mainly by the choice of detector rather than by the transport: the Isolation Forest raises recall and F1 score (0.965 live in the monolithic variant) over the baseline by flagging low-volume attack windows that the baseline misses. The transport is not neutral, however: gRPC reaches almost the same accuracy as the monolithic variant while adding less than 2 milliseconds of transport time per window, whereas the asynchronous Kafka pipeline trails by roughly nine percentage points and adds about 27 milliseconds. These findings clarify the trade-off between detection quality and architectural overhead when deploying a NIDS on resource-constrained hardware.
Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.12605