title: Optimizing SIEM Throughput on the Cloud Using Parallelization.
abstract: Processing large amounts of data in real time for identifying security issues pose several performance challenges, especially when hardware infrastructure is limited. Managed Security Service Providers (MSSP), mostly hosting their applications on the Cloud, receive events at a very high rate that varies from a few hundred to a couple of thousand events per second (EPS). It is critical to process this data efficiently, so that attacks could be identified quickly and necessary response could be initiated. This paper evaluates the performance of a security framework OSTROM built on the Esper complex event processing (CEP) engine under a parallel and non-parallel computational framework. We explain three architectures under which Esper can be used to process events. We investigated the effect on throughput, memory and CPU usage in each configuration setting. The results indicate that the performance of the engine is limited by the number of events coming in rather than the queries being processed. The architecture where 1/4th of the total events are submitted to each instance and all the queries are processed by all the units shows best results in terms of throughput, memory and CPU usage.
authors.affiliation: Dept. of Computer Science, COMSATS Institute of Information technology, Islamabad, Pakistan.
authors.forename: Masoom
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Alam
authors.affiliation: Trillium Information Security Systems, Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
authors.forename: Asif
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ihsan
authors.affiliation: NUST College of EME, National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan.
authors.forename: Muazzam A
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-5941-1849
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Khan
authors.affiliation: Deptt of Computer Science, International Islamic University, Islamabad, Pakistan.
authors.forename: Qaisar
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Javaid
authors.affiliation: Dept. of Computer Science, COMSATS Institute of Information technology, Islamabad, Pakistan.
authors.forename: Abid
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Khan
authors.affiliation: Dept. of Computer Science, COMSATS Institute of Information technology, Islamabad, Pakistan.
authors.forename: Jawad
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Manzoor
authors.affiliation: Dept. of Computer Science, COMSATS Institute of Information technology, Islamabad, Pakistan.
authors.forename: Adnan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Akhundzada
authors.affiliation: King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
authors.forename: Muhammad Khurram
authors.initials: MK
authors.lastname: Khan
authors.affiliation: Dept. of Computer Science, COMSATS Institute of Information technology, Islamabad, Pakistan.
authors.forename: Sajid
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Farooq
mesh_terms: D000067917:Cloud Computing; D003201:Computers; D001330:Electronic Data Processing; D012984:Software