Secure and Scalable QoS for Critical Applications

With the proliferation of online payment systems, the emergence of globally distributed consensus algorithms, and the increase of remotely managed critical IoT infrastructure, the need for critical-yet-frugal communication—high-availability and low-rate—is becoming increasingly pressing. For many of these applications, the use of leased lines or SD-WAN solutions is impractical due to their inflexibility and high costs, while standard Internet communication lacks the necessary reliability and attack resilience.To address this rising demand for strong quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees, we develop the GMA-based light-weight communication protocol (GLWP), building on a recent theoretical result, the GMA algorithm. GLWP is a capability-based protocol which is able to bootstrap network-wide bandwidth allocations in single round-trip times, and achieves high availability even under active attacks. Due to its clever use of cryptographic mechanisms, GLWP introduces minimal state in the network and causes low computation and communication overhead. We implement a GLWP prototype using Intel DPDK and show that it achieves line rate on a 40 Gbps link running on commodity hardware, thus showing that GLWP is a viable solution to provide strong QoS guarantees for critical-yet-frugal communications.