Build a 10Gbps Intrusion Detection System using Suricata and AF_PACKET

When evaluating network security on multi-gigabit connections, traditional iptables rules aren't enough—they cannot inspect application payloads. However, running Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) at 10Gbps using standard libpcap will instantly max out CPU cores due to memory-copy overhead.

[ 10Gbps Network Traffic ]
│
▼
[ NIC Driver (Offloading OFF) ]
│
(AF_PACKET Ring Buffer) <── Zero-Copy Memory Map
│
▼
[ Suricata Multi-Threaded Workers ] ──► [ CPU Thread Pinning ]
│
▼
[ Real-Time Threat Alerts ]

Technical Setup Highlights:

1. NIC Offload Disabling: Turn off Generic Receive Offload (GRO) and Large Receive Offload (LRO) using ethtool so Suricata inspects exact wire-level frames.
2. AF_PACKET Zero-Copy Mode: Configure mmap ring buffers in /etc/suricata/suricata.yaml to pass packet pointers directly from the driver to user space.
3. Thread Affinity: Pin reader/worker threads to dedicated physical CPU cores to minimize cache misses and context switches.

Step-by-Step Implementation:
Learn how to configure, tune, and test a 10Gbps IDS node on an EPY Host bare metal server:
🔗 https://www.epyhost.com/tutorials/howto/build-10gbps-ids-suricata/