Securing high-speed InfiniBand networks

The InfiniBand standard is a relatively recent (in network history) technology that enables very high throughput and very low latency. It accomplishes this by having a very low overhead on the network layer (protocol) and direct access from user applications to the network level. This direct access also has implications for SELinux, as the Linux kernel is no longer actively involved in the transport of data across an InfiniBand link.

Let's first look at what InfiniBand looks like, after which we can see how to still apply SELinux controls to its communication flows.

Directly accessing memory

One of the main premises of InfiniBand is to allow user applications to have direct access to the network. By itself, InfiniBand is a popular Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) implementation, which has received significant support from vendors. We find RDMA actively used in high-performance clusters.

Because of the direct access, controls...