VCP4: Virtualization of the Programmable Data Plane for Security Protocol

With the development of network security technology, network security protocol emerges one by one, which requires functional support from network forwarding devices. Due to the independence of protocols, the programmable data plane enables rapid deployment of security protocols. However, the current programmable data plane has the problem that the header is parsed multiple times, the exclusive data plane and the cryptographic algorithm are difficult to implement. In view of the above problems, VCP4(Virtualization Cryptogram P4) as a virtualized programmable data plane for security protocols is proposed, which reduces the number of parsing times and improves the header parsing efficiency by introducing a description header. The control flow queue generator and the dynamic mapping table are used to achieve the virtualization of the programmable data plane, thereby realizing the isolation of the data plane under the multi-tenant and solving the problem of the exclusive data plane. A cryptographic algorithm primitive is added to the VCP4 language compiler to implement a cryptographic algorithm that can be reused. Finally, the VCP4 resource utilization, virtualization performance and security protocol performance are evaluated. The results show that the implementation of VCP4 brings less performance loss, and the code amount can be reduced by 50%.