Security Enhancement in InfiniBand Architecture

The InfiniBandTM Architecture (IBA) is a new promising I/O communication standard positioned for building clusters and System Area Networks (SANs). However, the IBA specification has left out security resulting in potential security vulnerabilities, which could be exploited with moderate effort. In this paper, we view these vulnerabilities from three classical security aspects: availability, confidentiality, and authentication. For better availability of IBA, we recommend that a switch be able to enforce partitioning for data packets for which we propose an efficient implementation method using trap messages. For confidentiality, we encrypt only secret keys to minimize performance degradation. The most serious vulnerability in IBA is authentication since IBA authenticates packets solely by checking the existence of plaintext keys in the packet. In this paper, we propose a new authentication mechanism that treats the Invariant CRC (ICRC) field as an authentication tag, which is compati...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: IPPS
• Authors: Manhee Lee, Eun Jung Kim, Mazin S. Yousif
• Keywords: Authentication, Distributed And Parallel Computing, IBA Specification, IBA’s Authentication Capability, IPPS 2005