DNA: A Dependable NIC Architecture

The DNA project aims to develop and deploy trustworthy distributed systems on large-scale heterogeneousdatacenters (HDCs) such that their dependability properties, i.e., safety, security, and fault-tolerance, can beenforced by the foundational layers of the network hardware stack.Distributed systems have become ubiquitous in modern cloud environments, offering high availability, perfor-mance, and resource scalability. However, ensuring the dependability and performance of distributed systems inlarge-scale HDCs, which are vulnerable to malicious threats and arbitrary (Byzantine) failures, is a complex task.Existing systems are limited by (a) programmability: They lack a unified, trusted foundation for security andprogrammability, (b) security: They have vulnerabilities and may be unable to handle malicious attacks and(c) high-performance: They can be slow, especially in complex distributed systems. These limitations forceprogrammers to use ad-hoc methods, which can be expensive and unreliable.The DNA project seeks to resolve the design trade-off between security and performance by introducing anew trustworthy network-level abstraction. DNA realizes this abstraction by proposing a minimalistic,high-performance, and verifiable silicon-root-of-trust as the foundational hardware building block forimplementing trustworthy distributed systems.Our implementation of DNA on commodity SmartNICs will revolutionize the way distributed systems arebuilt in cloud environments. By providing a synergistic co-design of hardware-software networking substrate,we abstract out the hardware heterogeneity in cloud environments while providing a minimalistic interfacefor resource management, isolation, communication, and trust establishment. Overall, we aim to empowerprogrammers and significantly strengthen the dependability properties of widely adopted distributed systems.