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80 Gbps Deep Packet Inspection Hardware Announced
An anonymous reader writes to tell us that Procera Networks is launching a new weapon on the deep packet inspection (DPI) front. At $800,000 these 80 Gbps tanks aren't going to be sitting in everyone's closet, but it could mean that more traffic shaping is on the way. "The PL10000 can handle up to 5 million subscribers and can track 48 million real-time data flows. That's certainly a potent piece of hardware, but larger ISPs will need more. That's why Procera designed the new machines with full support for synchronizing traffic flows where return traffic might be routed to a different PacketLogic machine. The machine receiving the return traffic can make the machine monitoring the outbound traffic aware that it sees the other half of a TCP/IP conversation, for example, giving the devices more accuracy than those which might only have access to one side."
Just in time for the olympic games!
At almost a million dollars a pop, is it really saving money for ISPs to use these? How many would a major ISP need to shape all of their traffic?
80 Gbps tanks aren't going to be sitting in everyone's closet
Not until Wrath of the Lich King comes out ... wait, what were we talking about?
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
I guess a handful of these would beat a hojillion racks full commodity servers running pf+altq, but how does the cost really add up?
DPI has only one option when presented with encrypted information however (at least afaik). Give the packet a low priority or pass it through normally (of course, it could also drop it entirely but doing that as a rule would be problematic to say the least). So it would be possible to force a bet. Can the ISPs afford to give encrypted traffic a very low priority?
Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little.
And imagine a Beowolf cluster, and if it ran Linux, etc etc.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
in a few years when every client does opportunistic point-to-point encryption. We are headed that way, right?
Surely that money could be better spent improving their capacity by purchasing new equipment with better signaling methods or even extra lines rather than on equipment to inspect and shape (i.e. selectively throttle) traffic?
Even if improving the capacity costs a fair bit extra the space for more customers at higher speeds and more consistent service for existing customers will surely increase their profits by offering more than their competition right?
How much of this advertised speed is more or less advertising hype more than anything else??? We all know what it takes to do packet inspection and rules table lookups, so to me, this number seems a bit on the hyped up side...
Anyone else getting this same riff??
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Sounds like strong encryption needs to become the norm for everything. Encrypt everything and they have to fight harder to inspect it. It'll turn into a ridiculous arms race, but they're firing the first volley with this, and to do nothing is giving in to it.
I also think that stronger net privacy laws won't be enough to really stop it, since it's not just our government (Or indeed, not just governments in general,) that'll be using these.
only 80Gbps with 5 million subscribers? If my math isn't way off, that's about 16kbps - which is pretty pitiful speed. You'd have to throttle a lot just to be able to use one of these machines at max subscribers per machine.
Welcome to Comcast - our new TOS allows you to view text-only web pages with your *high speed* internet connection!
wtf is the point? p2p isn't going to slow down. It would also be hard to deal with encrypted p2p as instant messaging applications are using encrypted communication too, not to mention gov networks and credit networks.
I'm waiting for an ISP to use one of these so someone can sue the shit out of them for throttling their data connection.
$800,000/5 million subscribers = $0.16 per subscriber.
Expect to see the surcharge in your next bill!!!
Privacy is the big one. I can see a justification for finding DDoS attacks and zero-second malware propagation, this machine is nothing more than a net-neutrality killer of the highest order.
First big customers: Comcast, Rogers, Bell Canada, AT&T, and the others that we love to hate.
The FCC needs to investigate this thing NOW. It's a monopoly-maker in just 12U.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Maxwell Smart's communications might be ultra-secure, but nearby KAOS agents still hear whenever his shoe rings, y'know?
But if Agent 86's shoe phone rings while he is inside the Cone of Silence, does KAOS stll hear it?
ISPs will spend money on DPI/traffic shaping whether i like it or not, so might as well make it efficient.
in ankle bracelets on truants, cameras around london, etc.
those are just stunts, it is propaganda and hysteria to overinflate the significance of those developments
but this massive dpi stuff, this is big brother for real
but its not as sexy a lightning rod visceral symbolic issue like ankle bracelets on truants. so it won't experience the same outcry
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
think about the original definition of ethernet and of IP, in general.
in general, it was setup to pass packets and ideally to keep them in the same order and not drop them. beyond that, the upper layers (tcp and udp) did any higher level functions.
this worked! for the longest (damned) time, it worked.
and now, ISPs (and large networks) are starting to try to break out the 'cable is a bunch of bits' into discrete 'services' and then try to re-order things, drop things, queue them differently or somehow treat things non-uniformly.
I think this is Evil(tm).
I've been in the networking field for a few decades (really) and I've seen traffic shaping (what a euphemism, btw!) try to argue its case over and over again. but I keep getting back to the basic design principles of ethernet (csma-c/d) and tcp/udp-ip and when you have large enough pipes, you don't NEED a 'fast lane' or diamond lane, so to speak. it just mucks up the works, makes things harder to design and manage and really isn't helpful since you still need large pipes and all the shaping in the world won't CURE that, it only DEFERs things. that's not a cure.
data should be 'opaque' and first-come first-served. equal access. standard layer (phys, dl, network) rules should still apply.
ISPs who employ shaping are simply RIPPING OFF customers from their rightful bandwidth and also passing along the COST of the packet snooping hardware to us, the users. (don't think they'll just spring for the hardware on their own; they'll pass the costs of this stuff to us, to be sure).
I think its evil. once you look at it from enough angles, you see that its not at all a good thing.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
It's bad for the end user and good for the "corps" nothing good will come from this from my perspective, and not just because I am a p2p user.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
If my ISP is going to inspect my packets to the point of identifying their content as p2p, then they should be 100% responsible for any and all illegal activities I may or may not conduct on their connections.
The entire concept of the DMCA safe harbor clause was founded on the understanding that it would be virtually impossible for providers to monitor and filter illegal or unlawful activities and data. However, now it has become perfectly reasonable that they can identify and reroute or slow this traffic. This clearly nullify's the safeharbor provisions.
The ISP's need to realize they cant have it both ways.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
It looks like a disaster in a box to me: not only does it allow anyone with the price of the machine to monitor and inspect each and every packet you exchange, it also is capable of destroying the legal protections that ISPs currently enjoy.
The ISPs are treated like common carriers and are exempt from many liabilities because they carry all traffic equally and don't know or control the content of that traffic. Now that they're insisting that they need to "prioritize" some traffic at the expense of others, monitor and drop traffic because of its content, and are installing machines like these that further refine their ability to monitor and control what traffic you'll be allowed to transmit - well, their "safe harbor" exemptions are based on them not doing any of this.
Just the existence of this machine will be the undoing of many...
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Like all regex/NFA/DFA based inspection engines, they all fail when malware hides inside archive files.
Don't say that he's hypocritical
Say rather that he's apolitical
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun -- Tom Lehrer
I think I finally messed with someone's OODA Loop.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
From the people that brought you the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, its the War on Privacy!
To everyone saying, well, I'll just encrypt everything: That's great, but this thing falls back on service fingerprints to identify traffic if it can't inspect packet contents. This is a similar concept to nmap's service and OS fingerprinting tech. Idiosyncracies of timings, handshake protocols, header flags, and traffic patterns can give away that a packet contains p2p content.
Repeat after me: encryption isn't a panacea.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
I'll bet in the war against p2p, making p2p data look like normal "priority" data is going to be far easier, and far cheaper than the ISPs trying to identify and block/slow the data they don't like. Consider that hiding p2p data takes one person with a keyboard and some smarts. In a month this guy will work around any solution the $800K machine guys have put together, and the next machine will be 8 million dollars to do the same job.
Encryption? Just the first salvo. Others have pointed out that p2p makes a lot of connections. That's fine, just create a secure queuing system where people wait their turns (and don't have multiple data streams). Or, a repeater system where you get one or two data feeds in, and feed to one or two other people. There's no reason why a p2p system has to have 50 different connections to different people. Start looking at the data itself and see if it's http-like? Okee-doke, just create an http wrapper around your data so it looks like http. These are just the dumb ideas I came up with on the fly. Real solutions would be a lot better.
This kind of asymmetric "war" has been fought before, namely with copyright protection in the 80s. The result? Cracked programs are more valuable than non-cracked programs (oh, and all copyright protection schemes were cracked)
In a system with untrusted intelligent nodes, you can't really create a priority system without some people making their non-priority data look like priority data. The internet was designed for the end nodes to be smart, and the network to be dumb. (The exact opposite of the phone system). It seems to me this is just a basic design principle of the internet.
AccountKiller
As they have proven, they just blame the slow speeds on hackers and pirates, kick everyone off who complains or uses too much, and then over charge the rest.
I steal signatures. This one used to be yours.
With IPsec, they won't even be able to see what protocol is being used. The more we use IPsec for everything, the less these things will look like an attractive way to spend money that would otherwise go to expanding capacity.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
why cant this be done in a powerfull pc, a few gpus to do the math (trivial to paralelize), and a couple of pcie 16x channels to do the trafic... ad a few pcie 10gb ethernet and write good code... i mean, a 35k computer (cluster?) can do this, at a fraction of the cost!
Maybe it's because they want to do more than just monitor traffic volumes. One of the potential evils of this thing is that it can, for non-encrypted traffic like web access, track your web visits, see what you like, and report the top ten keywords for you to their spammer partners.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
for years. This is not new. They have products (marketed towards the intelligence side of the world initially) that have been able to do DPI in near realtime on OC circuits. They can even take it a step further and do near real time packet replacement and data insertion... This is what you should be afraid of.. not of the fact that they can read your traffic in real time, but they can manipulate it in near realtime. It goes much deeper as well when you tie these types of products into other things like firewalls, IDS/IPS, netflow monitoring, etc etc...
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
OK then lets play a game. I can still spot your traffic and classify it as p2p with near 100% accuracy. I'm not going to tell you how, you have to guess and experiment. If you reply here with another attempt then I'll tell you if you pass or fail, but not why.
Still want to play? If this sounds unfair then consider how this machine will be deployed...
PS You still haven't defeated the encryption fingerprints that the DPI uses but there is something much more obvious that identifies your traffic as p2p
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
Look at the priority the user requested for that packet, check to make sure the router you received the packet from hasn't filled their quota for that priority, and if not, give the packet that priority.
Remember when the internet was supposed to be a "dumb" network that could therefore be easily and seamlessly improved by just improving the software at the endpoints? Those were good times.
I'm not going to tell you how, you have to guess and experiment.
You obviously have underestimated peoples tenacity at solving puzzles. The is FUN to a lot of people, and all it takes is one guy to find out your secret.
but there is something much more obvious that identifies your traffic as p2p
I'm sure there is, and the P2P guys will work around that problem. Are you (the ISP) will to continue shoveling money into the companies that develop this, or would you rather just either buy more bandwidth, or establish real bandwidth usage limits? I'm betting on the latter. The war has to be worth fighting. The guys fighting the copy protection wars largely gave up 15+ years ago because they decided the cure was worse than the disease.
AccountKiller
'll simply change to an isp who doesn't block it.
You are lucky and in the minioriy who can choose from several broadband providers. I have a choice also.
It's Comcast of any of several dial-up offerings in the area.
Have you tried to do P-P on 0.3 Kbs dial-up lately?
The truth shall set you free!
l2iptables? All this hype seems to imply that 80gbps of data is actively changed... which would be impressive, but since it just queues it into priority based classes, it isn't. My SparcStation 5 can do 100mbps traffic shaping while sitting at 0.0 average load. So, for a machine that costs 800k, seems like an overpriced piece of hardware that can always be overcome by advanced protocol encryption. Why not spend it on giving everyone a bigger pipe? Oh WAIT, that would be more bandwidth for the P2P TERRORISTS, AHHHHHHH.
There is major difference between this and copy protection. btw I've never heard someone with so much religosity on the subject, outside of this bizarre context that is slashdot you would be quite scary
This "puzzle" has none of those characteristics. You are changing one of a million attributes of a dataflow. Somebody else is reading and estimating that attribute. You have to get the whole set to fall below their threshold before you get any feedback. That is what we call "work".
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
What I'm pointing out is that some of the give-aways that label a stream as p2p traffic are not simple to fix. They impact download performance.
Does that really matter? Reduced performance is better than no performance.
the pool of people skilled enough to do it that think it is fun is shrinking rapidly.
Why?
btw I've never heard someone with so much religosity on the subject, outside of this bizarre context that is slashdot you would be quite scary
Thanks for the douche bag comment. I really don't see any reason to get personal here.
You are changing one of a million attributes of a dataflow. Somebody else is reading and estimating that attribute.
I nice theoretical assessment, but how well will it stand up to the real world? How much processing can you reasonably do to each data flow to find out if you like it or not? How many false positives are you going to identify as p2p? How much maintenance cost do you have to do the system to keep it in working order? This is a non-trivial problem, as the environment keeps changing. In the end it's all about $$, and I'm betting the p2p guys can make it cheaper for the ISPs to stop trying to block p2p (or whatever other traffic they decide they don't like).
AccountKiller
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
Seriously. I have seen glaciers that move faster than Freenet.
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