Implementing ChaCha based crypto primitives on programmable SmartNICs

Kottur, Shaguftha Zuveria and Kadiyala, Krishna and Tammana, Praveen and et al, . (2022) Implementing ChaCha based crypto primitives on programmable SmartNICs. In: 3rd ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Workshop on Formal Foundations and Security of Programmable Network Infrastructures, FFSPIN 2022, 22 August 2022, Amsterdam.

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Abstract

Control and management plane applications such as serverless function orchestration and 4G/5G control plane functions are offloaded to smartNICs to reduce communication and processing latency. Such applications involve multiple inter-host interactions that were traditionally secured using SSL/TLS gRPC-based communication channels. Offloading the applications to smartNIC implies that we must also offload the security algorithms. Otherwise, we need to send the application messages to the host VM/container for crypto operations, negating offload benefits. We propose crypto externs for Netronome Agilio smartNICs that implement authentication and confidentiality (encryption/decryption) using the ChaCha stream cipher algorithm. AES and ChaCha are two popular cipher suites, but we chose ChaCha since none of the smartNICs have ChaCha-based crypto accelerators. However, smartNICs have restricted instruction set, and limited memory, making it difficult to implement security algorithms. This paper identifies and addresses several challenges to implement ChaCha crypto primitives successfully. Our evaluations show that our crypto extern implementation satisfies the scalability requirement of popular applications such as serverless management functions and host in-band network telemetry. © 2022 ACM.

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IITH Creators:

IITH Creators	ORCiD
Tammana, Praveen	UNSPECIFIED

Item Type:

Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Additional Information:

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback. We thank Lasani Hussain for his contribution towards evaluation; we also thank Dr. Sambuddho Chakravarty, Dr. Pravein Kannan, and Ranjitha K for their valuable comments on the earlier drafts. This research is supported by NMICPS TiHAN IIT Hyderabad faculty fellowship.

Uncontrolled Keywords:

ChaCha algorithm; in-network crypto primitives; programmable data planes; SmartNICs

Subjects:

Computer science

Divisions:

Department of Computer Science & Engineering

Depositing User:

. LibTrainee 2021

Date Deposited:

29 Sep 2022 09:11

Last Modified:

29 Sep 2022 09:11