Securing networks with P4

Identifying the path followed by malicious traffic is needed to secure networks. The knowledge of the ingress and egress points, as well as the intermediate hops, allows in principle to counteract the attacks. The challenge is that identifying such paths requires proper and accurate monitoring; this means in turn to choose a sampling rate that allows for the path across the various devices to be determined, while not making the reporting burden too heavy for the networking devices. We intend to investigate how to use P4 to identify and store the first packet of every flow passing through the network alongside information about the path taken. If this proves to be possible and reliable, an outcome of this research would be a clear way to assess how changing the number of flows that can be detected affects performance.