A Secure, Fast, and Resource-Efficient Serverless Platform with Function REWIND

Serverless computing often utilizes the warm container technique to improve response times. However, this method, which allows the reuse of function containers across different function requests of the same type, creates persistent vulnerabilities in memory and file systems. These vulnerabilities can lead to security breaches such as data leaks. Traditional approaches to address these issues often suffer from performance drawbacks and high memory requirements due to the extensive use of user-level snapshots and complex restoration process.

The paper introduces REWIND, an innovative and efficient serverless function execution platform designed to address these security and efficiency concerns. REWIND ensures that after each function request, the container is reset to an initial state free of any sensitive data, including a thorough restoration of the file system to prevent data leakage. It incorporates a kernel-level memory snapshot management system, which significantly lowers memory usage and accelerates the rewind process. Additionally, REWIND optimizes runtime by reusing memory regions and leveraging the temporal locality of function executions, enhancing performance while maintaining strict data isolation between requests. The prototype of REWIND is implemented on OpenWhisk and Linux and evaluated with serverless benchmark workloads. The evaluation results have demonstrated that REWIND provides substantial memory savings while providing high function execution performance. Especially, the low memory usage makes more warm containers kept alive thereby improving the throughput as well as the latency of function executions while providing isolation between function requests.