Netdev 0x16 - HomaLS Tunneling messages through secure segments

Speakers: Tianyi Gao Michio Honda Info: To advance kTLS over DCTCP in datacenter networking [1], we propose Homa-Level Security (HomaLS), a transport-level encryption integrated with the Homa transport protocol. Homa is available as an out-of-tree Linux kernel module [2], which outperforms DCTCP by a large margin; Homa provides 1) receiver-driven congestion control, 2) packet scheduling that prioritizes small requests using multiple in-network queues, 3) one-to-many socket abstraction that preserves message boundaries, and 4.) reliable data transfer. Strawman design for secure communication over Homa would use TLS in the application, but that approach introduces the same challenge as TLS over TCP, that is, to prevent the application from using transparent, opportunistic NIC offloading, which is done by kTLS today. We thus propose HomaLS, transport-level encryption integrated with Homa, where applications read or write plain-text data. HomaLS performs segment-level encryption, because Homa utilizes TSO by overlaying the TCP header including the TCP options space. See more: https://netdevconf.info/0x16/session....