Helios: Learning and Adaptation of Matching Rules for Continual In-Network Malicious Traffic Detection

Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) are critical for web security by identifying and blocking malicious traffic. In-network NIDS leverage programmable switches for high-speed traffic processing. However, they are unable to reconcile the fine-grained classification of known classes and the identification of unseen attacks. Moreover, they lack support for incremental updates. In this paper, we propose Helios, an in-network malicious traffic detection system, for continual adaptation in attack-incremental scenarios. First, we design a novel Supervised Mixture Prototypical Learning (SMPL) method combined with clustering initialization to learn prototypes that encapsulate the knowledge, based on the weighted infinity norm distance. SMPL enables known class classification and unseen attack identification through similarity comparison between prototypes and samples. Then, we design boundary calibration and overlap refinement to transform learned prototypes into priority-guided matching rules, ensuring precise and efficient in-network deployment. Additionally, Helios supports incremental prototype learning and rule updates, achieving low-cost hardware reconfiguration. We implement Helios on a Tofino switch and evaluation on three datasets shows that Helios achieves superior performance in classifying known classes (92%+ in ACC and F1) as well as identifying unseen attacks (62% - 98% in TPR). Helios has also reduced resource consumption and reconfiguration time, demonstrating its scalability and efficiency for real-world deployment.