DPX: Data-Plane eXtensions for SDN Security Service Instantiation

SDN-based NFV technologies improve the dependability and resilience of networks by enabling administrators to spawn and scale-up traffic management and security services in response to dynamic network conditions. However, in practice, SDN-based NFV services often suffer from poor performance and require complex configurations due to the fact that network packets must be ‘detoured’ to each virtualized security service, which expends bandwidth and increases network propagation delay. To address these challenges, we propose a new SDN-based data plane architecture called DPX that natively supports security services as a set of abstract security actions that are then translated to OpenFlow rule sets. The DPX action model reduces redundant processing caused by frequent packet parsing and provides administrators a simplified (and less error-prone) method for configuring security services into the network. DPX also increases the efficiency of enforcing complex security policies by introducing a novel technique called action clustering, which aggregates security actions from multiple flows into a small number of synthetic rules. We present an implementation of DPX in hardware using NetFPGA-SUME and in software using Open vSwitch. We evaluated the performance of the DPX prototype and the efficacy of its flow-table simplifications against a range of complex network policies exposed to line rates of 10 Gbps. We find that DPX imposes minimal overheads in terms of latency (\(\approx \)0.65 ms in hardware and \(\approx \)1.2 ms in software on average) and throughput (\(\approx \)1% of simple forwarding in hardware and \(\approx \)10% in software for non-DPI security services). This translates to an improvement of 30% over traditional NFV services on the software implementation and 40% in hardware.