NetWarden: Mitigating Network Covert Channels without Performance Loss

Network covert channels are an advanced threat to the security and privacy of cloud systems. One common limitation of existing defenses is that they all come at the cost of performance. This presents significant barriers to their practical deployment in high-speed networks. We sketch the design of NetWarden, a novel defense whose key design goal is to preserve TCP performance while mitigating covert channels. The use of programmable data planes makes it possible for NetWarden to adapt defenses that were only demonstrated before as proof of concept, and apply them at linespeed. Moreover, NetWarden uses a set of performance boosting techniques to temporarily increase the performance of connections that have been affected by channel mitigation, with the ultimate goal of neutralizing its impact on performance. Our simulation provides initial evidence that NetWarden can mitigate several covert channels with little performance disturbance. As ongoing work, we are working on a full system design and implementation of NetWarden.