MARS: Defending TCP Protocol Abuses in Programmable Data Plane

The TCP protocol’s inherent lack of built-in security mechanisms has rendered it susceptible to various network attacks. Conventional defense approaches face dual challenges: insufficient line-rate processing capacity and impractical online deployment requirements. The emergence of P4-based programmable data planes now enables line-speed traffic processing at the hardware level, creating new opportunities for protocol protection. In this context, we present MARS -a data plane-native TCP abuse detection and mitigation system that synergistically combines the Beaucoup traffic monitoring algorithm with artificial neural network (ANN) based anomaly detection, enhanced by adaptive heuristic mitigation rules. Through comprehensive benchmarking against existing TCP defense mechanisms, our solution demonstrates 12.95% higher throughput maintenance and 25.93% improved congestion window recovery ratio during attack scenarios. Furthermore, the proposed framework establishes several novel evaluation metrics specifically for TCP protocol protection systems.