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One of the main roles of the Domain Name System (DNS) is to map domain names to IP addresses. Despite the importance of this function, DNS traffic often passes without being analyzed, thus making the DNS a center of attacks that keep evolving and growing. Software-based mitigation approaches and dedicated state-of-the-art firewalls can become a bottleneck and are subject to saturation attacks, especially in high-speed networks. The emerging P4-programmable data plane can implement a variety of network security mitigation approaches at high-speed rates without disrupting legitimate traffic. This paper describes a system that relies on programmable switches and their stateful processing capabilities to parse and analyze DNS traffic solely in the data plane, and subsequently apply security policies on domains according to the network administrator. In particular, Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) is leveraged to extract the domain name consisting of any number of labels and hence, apply filtering rules (e.g., blocking malicious domains). Evaluation results show that the proposed approach can parse more domain labels than any state-of-the-art P4-based approach. Additionally, a significant performance gain is attained when comparing it to a traditional software firewall -pfsense-, in terms of throughput, delay, and packet loss. The resources occupied by the implemented P4 program are minimal, which allows for more security functionalities to be added.
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eZTrust: Network-Independent Zero-Trust Perimeterization for Microservices
Emerging microservices-based workloads introduce new security risks in today's data centers as attacks can propagate laterally within the data center relatively easily by exploiting cross-service dependencies. As countermeasures for such attacks, traditional perimeterization approaches, such as network-endpoint-based access control, do not fare well in highly dynamic microservices environments (especially considering the management complexity, scalability and policy granularity of these earlier approaches). In this paper, we propose eZTrust, a network-independent perimeterization approach for microservices. eZTrust allows data center tenants to express access control policies based on fine-grained workload identities, and enables data center operators to enforce such policies reliably and efficiently in a purely network-independent fashion. To this end, we leverage eBPF, the extended Berkeley Packet Filter, to trace authentic workload identities and apply per-packet tagging and verification. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach through extensive evaluation of our proof-of-concept prototype implementation. We find that, when comparable policies are enforced, eZTrust incurs 2--5 times lower packet latency and 1.5--2.5 times lower CPU overhead than traditional perimeterization schemes.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1642158
- PAR ID:
- 10095203
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Symposium on SDN Research
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3314148.3314349
