Trusted Click: Overcoming Security issues of NFV in the Cloud

Network Function Virtualization has received a large amount of research and recent efforts have been made to further leverage the cloud to enhance NFV. However, since there are privacy and security issues with using cloud computing, work has been done to allow for operating on encrypted data, which introduces a large amount of overhead in both computation and data, while only providing a limited set of operations, since these encryption schemes are not fully homomorphic. We propose using trusted computing to circumvent these limitations by having hardware enforce data privacy and provide guaranteed computation. Prior work has shown that Intel's Software Guard Extensions can be used to protect the state of network functions, but there are still questions about the usability of SGX in arbitrary NFV applications and the performance of SGX in these applications. We extend prior work to show how SGX can be used in network deployments by extending the Click modular router to perform secure packet processing with SGX. We also present a performance evaluation of SGX on real hardware to show that processing inside of SGX has a negligible performance impact, compared to performing the same processing outside of SGX.