Trust and reliability for next generation routers
To support the flexibility and the different protocol operations and applications provided by today's internet, modern routers rely on high performance reliable general purpose multi core packet processing systems. Such processing systems are programmable and have replaced the traditional fixed logic hardware in the data path of such routers. This programmability introduces a lot of vulnerabilities and faults which make such systems susceptible to attacks and failures. Particularly, it is a difficult task to detect whether a processing core behaves correctly or it has a failure resulting from errors or attacks. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a novel approach to verify the correct operation of the network processor. We propose a secure, fault tolerant and reliable monitoring subsystem which functions in parallel with the processing core of the router and aids in the detection of attacks. We show that our system has the ability to detect the failure and restore securely the router's operation to a different, but functionally equivalent state.
MILCOM 2016 2016 IEEE Military Communications Conference