How SmartNICs Can Help Build Trustworthy Cloud Stacks
, Chief Technology Officer, secunet Security Networks AG
We'll demonstrate the essential principles of a well-designed architecture, and how this makes use of small and stable security functions. We'll explore the challenges of usual software stacks that are often dynamic and complex without well-defined security boundaries. We'll discuss how in the high security field, appliance-based security was state-of-the-art for a long time, providing security functions by means of physical boundaries, and detail how in modern cloud stacks everything is connected to each other: APIs, VXLAN setup, creating and connecting virtual machines, control plane databases, keys, and tokens. Attacks on compute nodes are evident, as malicious tenants can run any kind of workload. Learn how national and strategic use of SmartNICs in general, and the Bluefield DPU enables advantages such as the reanimation of the appliance-paradigm as a physical plug-in security function into each compute/control plane node in a cloud deployment.