D3: Lightweight Secure Fault Localization in Edge Cloud

Abstract

In pursuit of high-performance applications, the cloud is moving out of the data center and towards the edge. Secure data forwarding is critical for the users between the edge and the remote cloud. In this paper, we propose D3 (Demon Detector in Data Plane), a lightweight, secure fault localization mechanism, which can enable the users in the edge cloud to localize faulty links and thus avoid the faulty links to guarantee secure data forwarding along the path to the remote cloud. D3 utilizes the user to instruct the transit routers, thus empowering the user to detect whether the transit routers forward the packet as expected. Compared with existing schemes that are difficult to be deployed in practice due to the incurred heavy storage, computation, and communication overhead, D3 offloads most of the transit router’s storage and computation overhead, thus dramatically improving the deployment efficiency. Particularly, the length of the additional packet header in D3 is 2-5 times less than the state-of-the-art mechanisms, and the extra control packet overhead is ten times less while keeping a little constant storage overhead in the data plane. The evaluations in BMv2 and Barefoot Tofino hardware show that D3 could achieve high fault localization accuracy and efficiency.