TNIC: A Trusted NIC Architecture
Dimitra Giantsidi, Julian Pritzi, Felix Gust, Antonios Katsarakis,, Atsushi Koshiba, Pramod Bhatotia

TL;DR
TNIC is a hardware-verified network interface architecture that enhances trustworthiness and performance in distributed systems operating in untrusted cloud environments.
Contribution
The paper introduces TNIC, a minimal, formally verified silicon root-of-trust at the network interface level, enabling trustworthy, high-performance distributed systems in untrusted settings.
Findings
Up to 6x performance improvement over CPU-centric TEE systems
Formal verification of safety and security properties of TNIC
Development of a generic API and recipe for trustworthy distributed systems
Abstract
We introduce TNIC, a trusted NIC architecture for building trustworthy distributed systems deployed in heterogeneous, untrusted (Byzantine) cloud environments. TNIC builds a minimal, formally verified, silicon root-of-trust at the network interface level. We strive for three primary design goals: (1) a host CPU-agnostic unified security architecture by providing trustworthy network-level isolation; (2) a minimalistic and verifiable TCB based on a silicon root-of-trust by providing two core properties of transferable authentication and non-equivocation; and (3) a hardware-accelerated trustworthy network stack leveraging SmartNICs. Based on the TNIC architecture and associated network stack, we present a generic set of programming APIs and a recipe for building high-performance, trustworthy, distributed systems for Byzantine settings. We formally verify the safety and security properties…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSecurity and Verification in Computing · Cloud Data Security Solutions · Advanced Data Storage Technologies
