A virtual firewall based on Network Function Virtualization (NFV) with Software Defined Networking (SDN) provides high scalability and flexibility for low-cost monitoring of legacy networks by dynamically deploying virtual network appliances rather than traditional hardware-based appliances. However, full utilization of virtual firewalls requires efficient management of computer virtualization resources and on-demand placement of virtual firewalls by steering traffic to the correct routing path using an SDN controller. In this paper, we design P4Guard, a software-based configurable firewall based on a high-level domain-specific language to specify packet processing logic using P4. P4Guard is a protocol-independent and platform-agnostic software-based firewall that can be incorporated into software switches that is highly usable and deployable. We evaluate the efficiency of P4Guard in processing traffic, compared to our previous virtual firewall in NFV.
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On the Safety and Efficiency of Virtual Firewall Elasticity Control
Traditional hardware-based firewall appliances are placed at fixed locations with fixed capacity. Such nature makes them difficult to protect today’s prevailing virtualized environments. Two emerging networking paradigms, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN), offer the potential to address these limitations. NFV envisions to implement firewall function as software instance (a.k.a virtual firewall). Virtual firewalls provide great flexibility and elasticity, which are necessary to protect virtualized environments. In this paper, we propose to build an innovative virtual firewall
controller, VFW Controller, to enable safe, efficient and costeffective virtual firewall elasticity control. VFW Controller addresses four key challenges with respect to semantic consistency,
correct flow update, buffer overflow avoidance, and optimal scaling in virtual firewall scaling. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we implement the core components of VFW Controller on top of NFV and SDN environments. Our experimental results demonstrate that VFW Controller is efficient to provide safe elasticity control of virtual firewalls.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10047713
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 24th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2017)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
