• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea TC
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• v.43 no.7 s.349
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• pp.93-103
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• 2006

Network solutions for protecting against worm attacks that complement partial end system patch deployment is a pressing problem. In the content-based worm filtering, the challenges focus on the detection accuracy and its performance enhancement problem. We present a worm filter architecture using the bloom filter for deployment at high-speed transit points on the Internet, including firewalls and gateways. Content-based packet filtering at multi-gigabit line rates, in general, is a challenging problem due to the signature explosion problem that curtails performance. We show that for worm malware, in particular, buffer overflow worms which comprise a large segment of recent outbreaks, scalable -- accurate, cut-through, and extensible -- filtering performance is feasible. We demonstrate the efficacy of the design by implementing it on an Intel IXP network processor platform with gigabit interfaces. We benchmark the worm filter network appliance on a suite of current/past worms, showing multi-gigabit line speed filtering prowess with minimal footprint on end-to-end network performance.