"Towards Large Scale Packet Capture and Network Flow Analysis on Hadoop" by Miguel Zenon Nicanor L. Saavedra and William Emmanuel S. Yu
 

Towards Large Scale Packet Capture and Network Flow Analysis on Hadoop

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

11-2018

Abstract

Network traffic continues to grow yearly at a compounded rate. However, network traffic is still being analyzed on vertically scaled machines that do not scale as well as distributed computing platforms. Hadoop's horizontally scalable ecosystem provides a better environment for processing these network captures stored in packet capture (PCAP) files. This paper proposes a framework called hcap for analyzing PCAPs on Hadoop inspired by the Rseaux IP Europens' (RIPE's) existing hadoop-pcap library but built completely from the ground up. The hcap framework improves several aspects of the hadoop-pcap library, namely protocol, error, and log handling. Results show that, while other methods still outperform hcap, it not only performs better than hadoop-pcap by 15% in scan queries and 18% in join queries, but it's more tolerant to broken PCAP entries which reduces preprocessing time and data loss, while also speeding up the conversion process used in other methods by 85%.

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