Prototyping Fast, Simple, Secure Switches for Ethane

We recently proposed Ethane: A clean-slate approach to managing and securing enterprise networks. The goal of Ethane is to make enterprise networks (e.g. networks in companies, universities, and home offices) much easier to manage. Ethane is built on the premise that the only way to manage and secure networks is to make sure we can identify the origin of all traffic, and hold someone (or some machine) accountable for it. So first, Ethane authenticates every human, computer and switch in the network, and tracks them at all times. Every packet can be immediately identified with its sender. Second, Ethane implements a network-wide policy language in terms of users, machines and services. Before a flow is allowed into the network, it is checked against the policy. Ethane requires two substantial changes to the network: Network switches and routers are replaced with much simpler switches, that are based on flow-tables. The switch doesn’t learn addresses, doesn’t run spanning tree, routing protocols or any access control lists. All it does is permit or deny flows under the control of a central controller. The controller is the second big change. Each network contains a central controller that decides if a flow is to be allowed into the network. It makes its decisions based on a set of rules that make up a policy. One premise of Ethane is that although the network is much more powerful as a whole, the switches are much simpler than conventional switches and routers. To explore whether this is true, we built 4-port Ethane switches in dedicated hardware (on the NetFPGA platform), running at 1Gb/s per port. We have deployed the switches in our network at Stanford University, and demonstrated that despite the simplicity of the switches, Ethane can support a very feature-rich and easy-to-manage network.