Harnessing Multicore Processors for High-Speed Secure Transfer

A growing need for ultra-high-speed data transfers has motivated continued improvements in the transmission speeds of the physical network layer. As researchers develop protocols and software to operate over such networks, they often fail to account for security. The processing power required to encrypt or sign packets of data can significantly decrease transfer rates, and thus security is often sacrificed for throughput. Emerging multicore processors provide a higher ratio of CPUs to network interfaces and can, in principle, be used to accelerate encrypted transfers by applying multiple processing and network resources to a single transfer. We discuss the attributes that network protocols and software must have to exploit such systems. In particular, we study how these attributes may be applied in the GridFTP code distributed with the globus toolkit. GridFTP is a well-accepted and robust protocol for high-speed data transfer. It has been shown to scale to near-network speeds. While GridFTP can provide encrypted and protected data transfers, it historically suffers transfer performance penalties when these features are enabled. We present configurations to the Globus GridFTP server that can achieve fully encrypted high-speed data transfers.