Partners from INESC-ID are ensuring that the ACES platform meets industry standards for network security and performance—critical non-functional properties for both individual components and the system as a whole. 

To achieve these objectives, two key components are being developed and integrated: the Network Function Accelerator and the Network Attack Detector. The Network Function Accelerator focuses on automatic network acceleration by leveraging parallelization mechanisms such as Receive Side Scaling (RSS) and disaggregating network functionality across hosts and network switches. The Network Attack Detector runs intrusion detection directly on a commodity switch. Its core innovation lies in performing AI/ML-based feature computation within the switch’s data plane, which then feeds an intrusion inference engine running in the control plane. This enables high-performance intrusion detection at Terabit scales. At this stage, prototypes of both components have been developed, validated, and evaluated against state-of-the-art systems.