HardWhale: A Hardware-Isolated Network Security Enforcement System for Cloud Environments

With the increasing popularity of containers for deploying microservices, ensuring the security of container networks has become a vital concern. However, current security solutions rely on a host's operating system (OS) to enforce network policies for container traffic. This design incurs severe overhead and cannot guarantee container network security when attackers gain access to the host's OS. Therefore, we propose HardWhale, a hardware-isolated network security enforcement system for containers that delivers high-performance and robust network security without depending on the host's OS. HardWhale leverages a smartNIC, physically isolating the entire container traffic inspection stack from the host and accelerating inspection tasks. Inspection policies securely reside within the smartNIC and are updated in runtime without involving the host, due to our isolated policy management mechanism. This design ensures robust network security for containers, even if the host is exposed to attackers. Evaluations show that HardWhale protects containers against various network attacks in compromised environments and improves HTTP throughput threefold and HTTP latency 2.3-fold compared to state-of-the-art solutions.