DNA: A Dependable NIC Architecture

Descrizione del progetto

Costruire la fiducia nella spina dorsale del cloud

Il cloud computing è alla base di quasi tutto ciò che facciamo, ma gli enormi centri dati che vi stanno dietro sono vulnerabili. Quando questi sistemi si guastano o subiscono un ciberattacco, spesso è perché la loro sicurezza è un pensiero secondario. Ciò rende fragile l’intera rete. Il progetto DNA, finanziato dal CER, intende integrare la sicurezza nei chip fisici dei computer che aiutano i server a comunicare. È come costruire un caveau digitale nelle fondamenta stesse della casa, anziché limitarsi a mettere una serratura sulla porta d’ingresso. Utilizzando schede di rete standard per gestire la sicurezza, DNA semplifica il lavoro dei programmatori. Il risultato è un’infrastruttura cloud più veloce, sicura e intrinsecamente più resistente agli attacchi e agli incidenti.

Obiettivo

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.