Tracking container network connections in a Digital Data Marketplace with P4

Abstract

There are multiple organizations interested in sharing their data, and they can only do this if a secure platform for data sharing is available which can execute sharing requests under specific agreements and policies. Digital Data Marketplaces (DDMs) aim to provide such an infrastructure. For building a DDM infrastructure, we use containers to provide the required isolation between different sharing requests. However, one important challenge in a containerized DDM infrastructure is providing the ability to monitor the behavior of containers that are involved in the sharing transactions. In addition, the monitoring information in the network layer should be reported in a way that can be interpreted by the upper layers of DDM for further analysis. In this paper, we design a containerized DDM using P4. In our design, the flow traffic between containers is associated with the shared data in a DDM and can be understood by the upper layers. We present different scenarios to demonstrate how our setup can assist in tracking the behavior of containers and providing better performance and security.