(A) design of decentralized network system via offloading transport layer secure onto SmartNIC

Abstract

As the popularity of Transport Layer Security (TLS) is rapidly increasing, modern network servers are often burdened with extra operations that consume substantial compute cycles, which degrades the overall performance. While existing works have mitigated this extra CPU load by offloading it to dedicated accelerators, they consider offloading only crypto algorithms while executing the TLS operations on the host. Unfortunately, such an approach not only complicates the program structure as the host side needs to invoke asynchronous APIs to communicate with the accelerators, but it also incurs an extra overhead for secure state synchronization during the entire connection. In this thesis, we present SmartTLS, a modularized TLS offloading system that handles the secure connection establishment including server authentication and session key exchange, by leveraging SmartNIC as an integrated accelerator. While improving the performance by exploiting the built-in crypto accelerator on the SmartNIC, we address the challenges in splitting the network stacks across the NIC and the host. We implement and deploy SmartTLS for a web server, and demonstrate that it outperforms an existing web server on Linux while consuming much less CPU cycles.