Secure State Migration in the Data Plane

Introudction

P4Sync is a data plane state synchronization protocol. It can synchronize state across P4 switches securely and completely with low overhead. The detailed deisgn of P4Sync can be found in paper: Secure State Migration in the Data Plane (SPIN'20).

Run the code

Setup

We wrote P4Sync in P4 16 (bmv2) and tested it in Mininet. A Vagrantfile is provided to create the test environment. Just use the following command to create the test environment:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install virtualbox
sudo apt install ./vagrant_2.2.6_x86_64.deb
vagrant plugin install vagrant-disksize
vagrant up mininet
vagrant ssh mininet
sudo bash setup.sh
cd /vagrant # you will see the repo

We use the following topology. S1 is the source switch; S2 is the normal TCP destination; S3 is the synchronization destination. We use h2 to simulate the traffic generator that sends out synchronization packets periodically. We use h3 and h6 to simulate the switch control plane.

Run baseline

cd baseline
sudo bash run.sh
# in mininet
xterm h1 h4 h5
# in h4
sudo python recvNormal.py
# in h5
sudo python recvMigration.py
# in h1
cd ..
sudo python send.py

# h4 will print info of received normal TCP packets;
# h5 will print info of received synchronization packets and synchronization progress.

Run P4Sync

cd p4sync
sudo bash run.sh
# in mininet
xterm h2 h3 h5 h6
# in h3
sudo python RSASender.py
# in h6
sudo python RSAReceiver.py
# in h5
sudo python recvMigration.py
# in h2
cd ..
sudo python send.py

# h3 will print info of received packets for RSA signatures;
# h5 will print info of received synchronization packets and synchronization progress.
# h6 will print info of RSA signature verification results;

Citing

If you feel our paper and code is helpful, please consider citing our paper by:

@inproceedings{xing2020p4sync,
  title={Secure State Migration in the Data Plane},
  author={Xing, Jiarong and Chen, Ang and Ng, TS Eugene},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the Workshop on Secure Programmable Network Infrastructure (SPIN'20)},
  pages={28--34},
  year={2020}
}

Contact

If you have any questions about of design and the code, please contact the author:

Jiarong Xing (jxing@rice.edu)

License

The code is released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.