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 of our TNIC while demonstrating its use by building four trustworthy distributed systems. Our evaluation of TNIC shows up to 6× performance improvement compared to CPU-centric TEE systems.

Today's modern hardware, with manycore servers, RDMA-capable networks and trusted execution environments, challenges the conventional wisdom about CFT protocols' design. We explore the synergy between modern hardware and the security and performance of strongly consistent replication protocols. Specifically, can we leverage (and how) modern cloud hardware to harden the security properties of a CFT protocol for Byzantine settings while achieving high performance?

Stateful serverless applications need to persist their state and data. The existing approach is to store the data in general purpose storage systems. However, these approaches are not designed to meet the demands of serverless applications in terms of consistency, fault tolerance and performance.

Cloud infrastructure is experiencing a shift towards disaggregated setups, especially with the introduction of the Compute Express Link (CXL) technology, where byte-addressable ersistent memory (PM) is becoming prominent. To fully utilize the potential of such devices, it is a necessity to access them through network stacks with equivalently high levels of performance (e.g., kernel-bypass, RDMA). While, these advancements are enabling the development of high-performance data management systems, their deployment on untrusted cloud environments also increases the security threats. To this end, we present Anchor, a library for building secure PM systems. Anchor provides strong hardware-assisted security properties, while ensuring crash consistency. Anchor exposes APIs for secure data management within the realms of the established PM programming model, targeting byte-addressable storage devices. Anchor leverages trusted execution environments (TEE) and extends their security properties on PM. While TEE's protected memory region provides a strong foundation for building secure systems, the key challenge is that: TEEs are fundamentally incompatible with PM and kernel-bypass networking approaches-in particular, TEEs are neither designed to protect untrusted non-volatile PM, nor the protected region can be accessed via an untrusted DMA connection. To overcome this challenge, we design a PM engine that ensures strong security properties for the PM data, using confidential and authenticated PM data structures, while preserving crash consistency through a secure logging protocol. We further extend the PM engine to provide remote PM data operations via a secure network stack and a formally verified remote attestation protocol to form an end-to-end system. Our evaluation shows that Anchor incurs reasonable overheads, while providing strong security properties.

Distributed transaction processing is a fundamental building block for large-scale data management in the cloud. Given the threats of security violations in untrusted cloud environments, our work focuses on: How to design a distributed transactional KV store that achieves high-performance serializable transactions, while providing strong security properties?We introduce Treaty, a secure distributed transactional KV storage system that supports serializable ACID transactions while guaranteeing strong security properties: confidentiality, integrity, and freshness. Treaty leverages trusted execution environments (TEEs) to bootstrap its security properties, but it extends the trust provided by the limited enclave (volatile) memory region within a single node to build a secure (stateful) distributed transactional KV store over the untrusted storage, network and machines. To achieve this, Treaty embodies a secure two-phase commit protocol co-designed with a high-performance network library for TEEs. Further, Treaty ensures secure and crash-consistent persistency of committed transactions using a stabilization protocol. Our evaluation on a real hardware testbed based on the YCSB and TPC-C benchmarks shows that Treaty incurs reasonable overheads, while achieving strong security properties.

Workload consolidation has been shown to achieve improved resource utilisation in modern datacentres. In this paper we focus on the extended problem of allocating resources when co-locating High-Priority (HP) and Best-Effort (BE) applications. Current approaches either neglect this prioritisation and focus on maximising the utilisation of the server or favour HP execution resulting to severe performance degradation for BEs. We propose DICER, a novel, practical, dynamic cache partitioning scheme that adapts the LLC allocation to the needs of the HP and assigns spare cache resources to the BEs. Our evaluation reveals that DICER successfully increases the system's utilisation, while at the same time minimising the impact of co-location on HP's performance.