Security versus performance tradeoffs in RPC implementations for safe language systems

Abstract

In current distributed systems, the performance of remote procedure calls (RPCs) is determined primarily by the performance of the underlying network transport. While the overheads of the RPC system itself are secondary, two ongoing developments are likely to change this and will cause the current RPC systems to become the bottleneck in communication: user-level network interfaces and safe languages. User-level network interfaces such as VIA [2], U-Net [10], Fast Messages [8], NoW Active Messages [1], or Shrimp VMMC [3] are removing the operating system from the critical communication path by allowing applications to access the network interface directly. As a result, the overhead of the network transport underlying RPC decreases by almost an order of magnitude. At the same time, the increasing adoption of Java as the “internet programming language” places a heavier burden on the RPC system because communication among Java programs must satisfy the type safety properties assumed by the language run-time (this is a general issue with safe languages). Typically enforcing this type safety requires additional operations (e.g. checks) in the critical RPC path.