GNFC: Towards Network Function Cloudification

An increasing demand is seen from enterprises to host and dynamically manage middlebox services in public clouds in order to leverage the same benefits that network functions provide in traditional, in-house deployments. However, today's public clouds provide only a limited view and programmability for tenants that challenges flexible deployment of transparent, software-defined network functions. Moreover, current virtual network functions can't take full advantage of a virtualized cloud environment, limiting scalability and fault tolerance. In this paper we review and evaluate the current infrastructural limitations imposed by public cloud providers and present the design and implementation of GNFC, a cloud-based Network Function Virtualization (NFV) framework that gives tenants the ability to transparently attach stateless, container-based network functions to their services hosted in public clouds. We evaluate the proposed system over three public cloud providers (Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engine) and show the effects on end-to-end latency and throughput using various instance types for NFV hosts

GPUNFV: a GPU-Accelerated NFV System

This paper presents GPUNFV, a high-performance NFV system providing flow-level micro services for stateful service chains with Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) acceleration. GPUNFV exploits the massively-parallel processing power ofGPU tomaximize the throughput of theNFV system. Combined with the customized flow handler, GPUNFV achieves a much better throughput than the existing NFV systems. With a carefully designed GPU-based virtualized network function framework, GPUNFV is able to e ciently support both stateful and stateless network functions. We have implemented a number of GPU-based network functions and a preliminary GPUNFV system to demonstrate the flexibility and potential of our design.published_or_final_versio

RMD (Resource Management in Diffserv) QoS-NSLP model

This draft describes a local QoS model, denoted as Resource Management in Diffserv (RMD) QoS model, for NSIS that extends the IETF Differentiated Services (Diffserv) architecture with a scalable admission control and resource reservation concept. The specification of this QoS model includes a description of its QoS parameter information, as well as how that information should be treated or interpreted in the network

On the Optimality of Virtualized Security Function Placement in Multi-Tenant Data Centers

Security and service protection against cyber attacks remain among the primary challenges for virtualized, multi-tenant Data Centres (DCs), for reasons that vary from lack of resource isolation to the monolithic nature of legacy middleboxes. Although security is currently considered a property of the underlying infrastructure, diverse services require protection against different threats and at timescales which are on par with those of service deployment and elastic resource provisioning. We address the resource allocation problem of deploying customised security services over a virtualized, multi-tenant DC. We formulate the problem in Integral Linear Programming (ILP) as an instance of the NP-hard variable size variable cost bin packing problem with the objective of maximising the residual resources after allocation. We propose a modified version of the Best Fit Decreasing algorithm (BFD) to solve the problem in polynomial time and we show that BFD optimises the objective function up to 80% more than other algorithms

Denial-of-Service Resistance in Key Establishment

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are an increasing problem for network connected systems. Key establishment protocols are applications that are particularly vulnerable to DoS attack as they are typically required to perform computationally expensive cryptographic operations in order to authenticate the protocol initiator and to generate the cryptographic keying material that will subsequently be used to secure the communications between initiator and responder. The goal of DoS resistance in key establishment protocols is to ensure that attackers cannot prevent a legitimate initiator and responder deriving cryptographic keys without expending resources beyond a responder-determined threshold. In this work we review the strategies and techniques used to improve resistance to DoS attacks. Three key establishment protocols implementing DoS resistance techniques are critically reviewed and the impact of misapplication of the techniques on DoS resistance is discussed. Recommendations on effectively applying resistance techniques to key establishment protocols are made

Packet Transactions: High-level Programming for Line-Rate Switches

Many algorithms for congestion control, scheduling, network measurement, active queue management, security, and load balancing require custom processing of packets as they traverse the data plane of a network switch. To run at line rate, these data-plane algorithms must be in hardware. With today's switch hardware, algorithms cannot be changed, nor new algorithms installed, after a switch has been built. This paper shows how to program data-plane algorithms in a high-level language and compile those programs into low-level microcode that can run on emerging programmable line-rate switching chipsets. The key challenge is that these algorithms create and modify algorithmic state. The key idea to achieve line-rate programmability for stateful algorithms is the notion of a packet transaction : a sequential code block that is atomic and isolated from other such code blocks. We have developed this idea in Domino, a C-like imperative language to express data-plane algorithms. We show with many examples that Domino provides a convenient and natural way to express sophisticated data-plane algorithms, and show that these algorithms can be run at line rate with modest estimated die-area overhead.Comment: 16 page