A fuzzy-based dynamic provision approach for virtualized network intrusion detection systems

With the increasing prevalence of virtualization and cloud technologies, virtual security appliances have emerged and become a new way for traditional security appliances to be rapidly distributed and deployed in IT infrastructure. However, virtual security appliances are challenged with achieving optimal performance, as the physical resource is shared by several virtual machines, and this issue is aggravated when virtualizing network intrusion detection systems (NIDS). In this paper, we proposed a novel approach named fuzzyVIDS, which enables dynamic resource provision for NIDS virtual appliance. In fuzzyVIDS, we use fuzzy model to characterize the complex relationship between performance and resource demands and we develop an online fuzzy controller to adaptively control the resource allocation for NIDS under varying network traffic. Our approach has been successfully implemented in the iVIC platform. Finally, we evaluate our approach by comprehensive experiments based on Xen hypervisor and Snort NIDS and the results show that the proposed fuzzy control system can precisely allocate resources for NIDS according to its resource demands, while still satisfying the performance requirements of NIDS.