• Corpus ID: 1948692

Sikker : A High-Performance Distributed System Architecture for Secure Service-Oriented Computing

@inproceedings{McDonald2016SikkerA,
  title={Sikker : A High-Performance Distributed System Architecture for Secure Service-Oriented Computing},
  author={Nic McDonald and William J. Dally},
  year={2016}
}

• Nic McDonald, W. Dally
• Published 2016
• Computer Science

In this paper, we present Sikker1, a high-performance distributed system architecture for secure service-oriented computing. Sikker includes a novel service-oriented application model upon which security and isolation policies are derived and enforced. The workhorse of Sikker is a custom network interface controller, called the Network Management Unit (NMU), that enforces Sikker’s security and isolation policies while providing high-performance network access. Sikker’s application model satisfies the complex interactions of modern large-scale distributed applications. Our experimentation results show that even when implemented on very large clusters, the NMU adds a negligible message latency of 41 ns under realistic workloads and 66 ns at the 99th percentile of worst case access patterns. Our analysis shows that the NMU can easily support over 100 Gbps with a single logic engine and that over 500 Gbps is achievable with more aggressive designs. Sikker’s service-oriented security and isolation mechanism removes high overheads imposed by current systems. Sikker allows distributed applications to operate in an environment with fine-grained security and isolation while experiencing supercomputer-like network performance.