Control and management plane applications such as serverless function orchestration and 4G/5G control plane functions are offloaded to smartNICs to reduce communication and processing latency. Such applications involve multiple inter-host interactions that were traditionally secured using SSL/TLS gRPC-based communication channels. Offloading the applications to smartNIC implies that we must also offload the security algorithms. Otherwise, we need to send the application messages to the host VM/container for crypto operations, negating offload benefits.We propose crypto externs for Netronome Agilio smartNICs that implement authentication and confidentiality (encryption/decryption) using the ChaCha stream cipher algorithm. AES and ChaCha are two popular cipher suites, but we chose ChaCha since none of the smartNICs have ChaCha-based crypto accelerators. However, smartNICs have restricted instruction set, and limited memory, making it difficult to implement security algorithms. This paper identifies and addresses several challenges to implement ChaCha crypto primitives successfully. Our evaluations show that our crypto extern implementation satisfies the scalability requirement of popular applications such as serverless management functions and host in-band network telemetry.

With the increase in internet of things (IoT) applications' range and scale, it is essential to test the applications before deploying them in the real world. Most common approaches utilize simulations and testbeds; however, these methods lack real-time failure scenarios and the capability to scale, respectively. A virtual environment is a suitable approach that overcomes these drawbacks further, IoT applications using cloud computing have evolved to shift some computing and storage capabilities to the edge networks for ensuring adherence to strict latency constraints for real-time applications. This led to the emergence of fog computing which provides lower latency and better security, among other advantages. As for any processing tasks, scheduling becomes a critical concern for matching the tasks with the devices having appropriate resources. This paper analyzes a hybridized fog scheduling algorithm based on a ranking approach considering latency as the main parameter. It builds a software layer for scheduling on top of the validating internet of things at large scales (VIoLET) infrastructure. The results are compared with the round-robin scheduling algorithm, and it is found that the hybridized algorithm provides closer actual latency values to the expected.

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