Deep Packet Inspection: A Key Issue for Network Security

Abstract

As the number of cyber-attacks continue to increase, the need for data protection increases as well. Deep Packet Inspection is a highly effective way to reveal suspicious content in the headers or the payloads in any packet processing layer, except when the payload is encrypted. DPI is an essential inspector of packet payloads as it is applied to many different layers of the OSI model. The DPI tasks include intrusion detection, exfiltration detection and parental filtering. This can be a great advantage as layer-independent attacks are becoming more prevalent. It allows for inspection of all layers for attacks. However, there are challenges that come with Deep Packet Inspection. Some include the decrease of throughput of the system, attacks through the Secured Socket Layer and intrusion fingerprint matching. These challenges do not constitute as grounds to eliminate DPI as a method, but instead obstacles to be aware of in case difficulties with implementation prevails.