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Auditing is a crucial component of network security practices in organizations with sensitive information such as banks and hospitals. Unfortunately, network function virtualization(NFV) is viewed as incompatible with auditing practices which verify that security functions operate correctly. In this paper, we bring the benefits of NFV to security sensitive environments with the design and implementation of AuditBox. AuditBox not only makes NFV compatible with auditing, but also provides stronger guarantees than traditional auditing procedures. In traditional auditing, administrators test the system for correctness on a schedule, e.g., once per month. In contrast, AuditBox continuously self-monitors for correct behavior, proving runtime guarantees that the system remains in compliance with policy goals. Furthermore, AuditBox remains compatible with traditional auditing practices by providing sampled logs which still allow auditors to inspect system behavior manually. AuditBox achieves its goals by combining trusted execution environments with a lightweight verified routing protocol (VRP). Despite the complexity of service function chain routing policies relative to traditional routing, AuditBox's protocol introduces 72-80% fewer bytes of overhead per packet (in a 5-hop service chain) and provides at 61-67% higher goodput than prior work on VRPs designed for the Internet 

Kernel-bypass network APIs, which allow applications to circumvent the kernel and interface directly with the NIC hardware, have recently emerged as one of the main tools for improving application network performance. However, allowing applications to circumvent the kernel makes it impossible to use tools (e.g., tcpdump) or impose policies (e.g., QoS and filters) that need to consider traffic sent by different applications running on a host. This makes maintainability and manageability a challenge for kernel-bypass applications. In response we propose Kernel On-Path Interposition (KOPI), in which traditional kernel dataplane functionality is retained but implemented in a fully programmable SmartNIC. We hypothesize that KOPI can support the same tools and policies as the kernel stack while retaining the performance benefits of kernel bypass.