Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Selim Ciraci

Geoff Outhred

Alastair Wolman

Stefan Saroiu

Geoffrey Hugh Outhred

Jack Wilson Stokes, Iii

Behnaz Arzani

Shekhar Agarwal

The techniques disclosed herein improve the efficiency, reliability and scalability of flow processing systems by providing a multi-tier flow cache structure that can reduce the size of a flow table and also reduce replicated flow sets. In some configurations, a system can partition a flow space across workers and replicate the flows within a partition to a set of workers. In some configurations, a flow cache structure can include three tiers: (1) a scalable flow processing layer for executing the actions and transformations of a flow, (2) a flow state management layer for managing distributed flow state decisions, and (3) a flow decider layer for identifying actions and transformations needs to be executed on each packet of a flow. Flow replications allow other workers to pick up flows allocated to a particular worker that is taken offline in the event of a crash or update.

Distributed flow processing and flow cache

A compromise detection system protects data centers (DCs) or other providers in the cloud. The compromise detection system can detect compromised virtual machines (VMs) through changes in network traffic characteristics while avoiding expensive data collection and preserving privacy. The compromise detection system obtains and uses periodically-obtained flow pattern summaries to detect compromised VMs. Agent-based detection on predetermined and compromised VMs can expose (using supervised learning) the network behavior of compromised VMs and then apply the learned model to all VMs in the DC. The compromise detection system can run continuously, protect the privacy of cloud customers, comply with Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and avoid various techniques that both erode privacy and degrade VM performance.

Methods and systems for scalable privacy-preserving compromise detection in the cloud

A server includes a processor and memory. An operating system is executed by the processor and memory. A network interface is run by the operating system and sends and receives flows using transmission control protocol (TCP). An agent application is run by the operating system and is configured to a) retrieve and store TCP telemetry data for the flows in a flow table; b) move selected ones of the flows from the flow table to a closed connections table when the flow is closed; and c) periodically send the flow table and the closed connections table via the network interface to a remote server.

Localizing network faults through differential analysis of TCP telemetry

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Bellevue, WA, United States of America

Selim Ciraci