Fpga design detects tcp scan attacks instantly on high-speed networks
A High-Throughput FPGA Architecture for Real-Time TCP-SYN Scan Detection
Cryptography and SecurityHardware Architecture
Summary
Cyber-attacks often start with scanning ports to find vulnerable spots. The authors designed a tiny, very fast computer chip system that can spot these scans in real time without slowing down the network. They made the design easy to change and tested it thoroughly, showing it works without mistakes. This system can watch thousands of suspicious patterns quickly, which is much faster than usual software methods.
What this means in practice
- •For network security teams: Implement real-time hardware-based detection of TCP port scans to catch early signs of cyber threats without impacting network speed.
- •For network hardware engineers: Design flexible FPGA frontends for intrusion detection that adapt to different network speeds by changing only the packet extraction module.
Authors
Faisal Saeed, Mohammad Fahad, Ayesha Javaid, Christian Doerr, Muhammad Ali Siddiqi
Abstract
TCP-SYN port scanning often precedes cyber-attacks, and early detection of scanner fingerprints embedded in packet headers can provide timely intrusion alerts. Existing approaches are either too computationally expensive for line-rate operation or limited to offline analysis. This brief presents a lightweight FPGA architecture for reconfigurable line-rate fingerprint detection, where each fingerprint is compiled into a shallow Boolean LUT tree, enabling parallel evaluation with constant two-cycle latency regardless of fingerprint count, while resource cost grows linearly with fingerprint count. This detection core is decoupled from a MAC-layer frontend that performs streaming field extraction with no frame buffering or higher-layer state, allowing deployment across different line rates by modifying only the frontend. A Python framework automatically compiles Boolean expressions into synthesizable HDL, eliminating manual RTL changes. For TCP-SYN port-scan fingerprint detection, the architecture uses approximately 0.5% LUTs at 10 Gbps on a Versal VCK190 for 18 deployed fingerprints, with capacity for over 2,000 concurrent fingerprints, and under 2.5% on a Virtex-6 at 1 Gbps, with a detection latency of 10 ns at both rates, three to four orders of magnitude below typical per-packet processing latency in software intrusion-detection systems. The system was cross-validated against a software re-implementation on an 8-hour production packet trace, confirming detection correctness with zero false positives/negatives.