Secure State Migration in the Data Plane
Jiarong Xing, Ang Chen, T. S. Eugene Ng · 2020
Programmable data planes enable stateful packet processing at hardware speeds---a new capability central to many recent systems. However, protocols and systems that effectively manage data plane state remain underexplored. This paper considers the problem of secure state migration, which can serve as an important building block for state management tasks. It delivers data plane state from a source switch to a destination effectively without a software controller, while providing strong cryptographic guarantees on authenticity. Our protocol, P4Sync, tackles several technical challenges, such as adapting memory copy techniques in VM migration, offloading per-packet security operations to the data plane, and amortizing heavyweight cryptographic overheads over a batch of packets. Our initial validation shows that P4Sync has low traffic and memory overheads.