HELIOS: Hardware-assisted High-performance Security Extension for Cloud Networking

Abstract

With the increasing adoption of containerization in cloud services, container networking has become a critical concern, as it enables the agile deployment of microservices but also introduces new vulnerabilities susceptible to network attacks, posing a threat to container environments. While several security solutions have been introduced to address this concern, they unfortunately exhibit significant shortcomings, including security vulnerabilities and limited performance. We thus propose Helios, a novel hardware-based network security extension that addresses the security and performance limitations in existing solutions. Leveraging a smartNIC, Helios enhances both the security and performance facets of container networking through two key mechanisms: (i) the establishment of physically isolated container communication channels and (ii) the network security engines fully offloaded to the smartNIC. Our evaluation shows that Helios mitigates various network threats initiated from both container- and host-side while performing up to 3x faster than the existing solutions in container communication.