Online reconfigurable line-rate matching of filter rules

In the software-defined networking paradigm, where the switching, filtering, and routing of traffic between devices is controlled at the software level through a collection of matching rules. The number of rules used in SDN systems to control the filtering and routing of network packets has grown in recent years, in order to limit a plethora of evolving attacks. Hardware switches typically store a few hundred or thousand rules, while CPU-based approaches introduce significant latency into the system. Our work, titled RePack-on-FPGA, looks to leverage the reconfigurability and I/O bandwidth of FPGAs to provide a system that can store tens to hundreds of thousands of filter rules, while supporting real-time updates of the ruleset through online reconfigurability, and modern line rates of 10G or higher.

In this talk, we will describe the RePack system architecture and host schema, and go into detail on the live reconfigurability and dynamic updating features it provides.