A Double-Edged Sword: Security Threats and Opportunities in One-Sided Network Communication

03/22/2019

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by   Shin-Yeh Tsai, et al.

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One-sided network communication technologies such as RDMA and NVMe-over-Fabrics are quickly gaining adoption in production software and in datacenters. Although appealing for their low CPU utilization and good performance, they raise new security concerns that could seriously undermine datacenter software systems building on top of them. This paper presents our insights into security implications of one-sided communication. In addition to security threats, we further discover opportunities of leveraging one-sided communication to enhance security, showing that one-sided communication is indeed a double-edged sword in security. As far as we know, this is the first work that discusses the security aspect of one-sided communication.