DNA: A Dependable NIC Architecture

Description du projet

Instaurer la confiance dans l’infrastructure cloud

L'informatique en nuage gère presque tout ce que nous faisons, mais les énormes centres de données qui la sous-tendent sont vulnérables. Lorsque ces systèmes tombent en panne ou sont victimes d’une cyberattaque, c’est souvent parce que leur sécurité n’a pas été prise en compte. Cela fragilise l’ensemble du réseau. Le projet DNA, financé par le CER, entend intégrer la sécurité aux puces informatiques physiques qui aident les serveurs à communiquer. Cela revient à construire un coffre-fort numérique dans les fondations mêmes d'une maison plutôt que de mettre un verrou sur la porte d'entrée. En exploitant des cartes réseau standard pour gérer la sécurité, DNA facilite la tâche des programmeurs. Il en résulte une infrastructure cloud plus rapide, plus sûre et intrinsèquement plus résistante aux attaques et aux accidents.

Objectif

The DNA project aims to develop and deploy trustworthy distributed systems on large-scale heterogeneous
datacenters (HDCs) such that their dependability properties, i.e. safety, security, and fault-tolerance, can be
enforced by the foundational layers of the network hardware stack.

Distributed systems have become ubiquitous in modern cloud environments, offering high availability, perfor-
mance, and resource scalability. However, ensuring the dependability and performance of distributed systems in
large-scale HDCs, which are vulnerable to malicious threats and arbitrary (Byzantine) failures, is a complex task.
Existing systems are limited by (a) programmability: They lack a unified, trusted foundation for security and
programmability, (b) security: They have vulnerabilities and may be unable to handle malicious attacks and
(c) high-performance: They can be slow, especially in complex distributed systems. These limitations force
programmers to use ad-hoc methods, which can be expensive and unreliable.

The DNA project seeks to resolve the design trade-off between security and performance by introducing a
new trustworthy network-level abstraction. DNA realizes this abstraction by proposing a minimalistic,
high-performance, and verifiable silicon-root-of-trust as the foundational hardware building block for
implementing trustworthy distributed systems.

Our implementation of DNA on commodity SmartNICs will revolutionize the way distributed systems are
built in cloud environments. By providing a synergistic co-design of hardware-software networking substrate,
we abstract out the hardware heterogeneity in cloud environments while providing a minimalistic interface
for resource management, isolation, communication, and trust establishment. Overall, we aim to empower
programmers and significantly strengthen the dependability properties of widely adopted distributed systems.