✦ Executive Abstract
Legacy security monitoring architectures penalize organizations for increasing their security posture. Cloud SIEM vendors bill linearly per gigabyte ingested, creating perverse economic incentives to filter, downsample, or discard critical telemetry at the perimeter. This whitepaper introduces Aetherion's edge Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) parsing and vector deduplication engine, proving mathematically that 60–80% of security log volume can be compressed at the edge without loss of forensic fidelity.
1. The Cloud Ingestion Tax Problem
Centralized SaaS SIEMs (such as Splunk Enterprise Security, Microsoft Sentinel, and Datadog) bill on uncompressed ingestion volume, typically ranging from $2.50 to $6.00 per gigabyte per month. In an enterprise processing 50 GB of daily Windows Event logs and network flow records, over 70% of ingested bytes represent repetitive JSON schema boilerplate, repeated thread identifiers, and redundant heartbeat records.
2. Edge Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) Parsing
By executing AST tokenization directly in memory before transmission, C.I.T.A.D.E.L. and the K.A.I.R.O.S. core inside P.H.A.L.A.N.X. extract syntactic structures and telemetry vectors into deterministic byte representations. This eliminates whitespace, redundant metadata wrappers, and repetitive log timestamps while retaining 100% cryptographic OCSF field parity.