Symphony: Path Validation at Scale

—Path validation has long been explored as a fundamental solution to secure future Internet architectures. It enables end-hosts to specify forwarding paths for their traffic and to verify whether the traffic follows the specified paths. In comparison with the current Internet architecture that keeps packet forwarding uncontrolled and transparent to end-hosts, path validation benefits end-hosts with flexibility, security, and privacy. The key design enforces routers to embed their credentials into cryptographic proofs in packet headers. Such proofs require sufficiently complex computation to guarantee unforgeability. This imposes an inevitable barrier on validation efficiency for a single packet. In this paper, we propose aggregate validation to implement path validation in a group-wise way. Amortizing overhead across packets in a group, aggregate validation promises higher validation efficiency without sacrificing security. We implement aggregation validation through Symphony, with various design techniques integrated and security properties formally proved. In comparison with state-of-the-art EPIC, Symphony speeds up packet processing by 3.78 ×∼ 18.40 × and increases communication throughput by 1.13 ×∼ 6.11 × .