Real-Time Visibility & Threat Detection
Metadata-First Security: Identifying Threats at 400 Gbps Without Performance Loss.
Visibility Without Contention
You cannot inspect every packet at 400 Gbps, nor can you log every system call on 5,000 nodes without crashing the filesystem. Real-time visibility in HPC requires a "Metadata-First" approach. We decouple monitoring from the compute fabric, ensuring zero latency while catching sophisticated actors masquerading as legitimate science.
1. Out-of-Band Analysis Architecture
Network Layer (Passive Tapping)
We use optical taps or SPAN ports to send traffic copies to a dedicated Security Cluster. This ensures that the primary compute path remains untouched by monitoring overhead.
Host Layer (eBPF & Agents)
On compute nodes, we utilize eBPF-based agents like Tetragon. They provide deep kernel-level visibility with significantly lower overhead than traditional auditd.
2. Zeek: Mastering the Elephant Flows
Zeek is the HPC industry standard. It condenses massive traffic streams into compact, queryable logs. Our configuration strategy maximizes signal-to-noise:
- Ignore Elephant Flows: We log only the setup and teardown of massive transfers, ignoring the terabytes of payload to save sensor CPU.
- JA3 Fingerprinting: Identifying malicious TLS clients instantly, even inside encrypted tunnels.
- Stratum Detection: Specialized scripts to flag crypto-mining protocols like those monitored by Stratum.
3. Catching the "Silent" Miner
A compromised account mining Bitcoin often looks like a legitimate physics job. We use heuristics to distinguish them:
CPU vs. Memory Ratio
Miners pin the CPU/GPU at 100% but use very little memory. We monitor these metrics using Prometheus and Grafana.
Connect-Back Detection
Jobs rarely need outbound internet access. Any socket opened to a public IP triggers an alert via Filebeat or Fluent Bit.
Visibility Toolset
| Component | Tool | Usage |
|---|---|---|
| Network IDS | Zeek | Metadata extraction at 100Gbps+ speeds. |
| SIEM / Log Mgmt | OpenSearch / ELK | Centralized threat correlation and visualization. |
| Host Observability | eBPF (Tetragon) | Low-overhead runtime security and forensics. |
| Endpoint Monitoring | Netdata | 1-second resolution for real-time node metrics. |
| Incident Response | PagerDuty / Slack | Automated alerting for critical security events. |
Eliminate the Blind Spots
Download our "HPC Visibility Blueprint" to learn how to deploy clustered Zeek and eBPF monitoring on your fabric.
Download Visibility Guide (.docx)