1 research outputs found
P4BFT: Hardware-Accelerated Byzantine-Resilient Network Control Plane
Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) enables correct operation of distributed,
i.e., replicated applications in the face of malicious take-over and
faulty/buggy individual instances. Recently, BFT designs have gained traction
in the context of Software Defined Networking (SDN). In SDN, controller
replicas are distributed and their state replicated for high availability
purposes. Malicious controller replicas, however, may destabilize the control
plane and manipulate the data plane, thus motivating the BFT requirement.
Nonetheless, deploying BFT in practice comes at a disadvantage of increased
traffic load stemming from replicated controllers, as well as a requirement for
proprietary switch functionalities, thus putting strain on switches' control
plane where particular BFT actions must be executed in software.
P4BFT leverages an optimal strategy to decrease the total amount of messages
transmitted to switches that are the configuration targets of SDN controllers.
It does so by means of message comparison and deduction of correct messages in
the determined optimal locations in the data plane. In terms of the incurred
control plane load, our P4-based data plane extensions outperform the existing
solutions by ~33.2% and ~40.2% on average, in random 128-switch and
Fat-Tree/Internet2 topologies, respectively. To validate the correctness and
performance gains of P4BFT, we deploy bmv2 and Netronome Agilio SmartNIC-based
topologies. The advantages of P4BFT can thus be reproduced both with software
switches and "commodity" P4-enabled hardware. A hardware-accelerated controller
packet comparison procedure results in an average 96.4% decrease in processing
delay per request compared to existing software approaches.Comment: Accepted for publication at IEEE Globecom 2019 CQR