Privacy-Preserving and Lightweight Verification of Deep Packet Inspection in Clouds

In the trend of network middleboxes as a service, enterprise customers adopt in-the-cloud deep packet inspection (DPI) services to protect networks. As network misconfigurations and hardware failures notoriously exist, recent efforts envision to ensure the execution integrity of DPI services in untrusted clouds. However, they either require enterprise customers to know proprietary DPI rulesets of cloud providers or introduce forbidden overhead in the network context. In the paper, we propose a privacy-preserving and lightweight verification scheme that efficiently checks whether in-the-cloud DPI services run correctly without leaking private DPI rulesets. Particularly, our design introduces one trusted third party to perform privacy-preserving and trustworthy ruleset evaluation and DPI execution verification. Meanwhile, it devises a novel DPI ruleset authentication method that enables tamper-proof DPI operations and facilitates fast proof generation. The proofs can be verified without requiring the verifier to always maintain all rulesets. To further reduce the verification costs while resisting cloud cheating behaviors like bias treatments of packets, it employs a commitment-based delayed sampling mechanism which requires the DPI services to first demonstrate that all packets have been processed before receiving sampling decisions. Moreover, extensive experiments are conducted based on Click modules. The results show that the proposed scheme is practical and only incurs the real-time overhead of 10–20 microseconds.