Embark: Securely Outsourcing Middleboxes to the Cloud

It is increasingly common for enterprises and other organizations to outsource network processing to the cloud. For example, enterprises may outsource firewalling, caching, and deep packet inspection, just as they outsource compute and storage. However, this poses a threat to enterprise confidentiality because the cloud provider gains access to the organization’s traffic.

We design and build Embark, the first system that enables a cloud provider to support middlebox outsourcing while maintaining the client’s confidentiality. Embark encrypts the traffic that reaches the cloud and enables the cloud to process the encrypted traffic without decrypting it. Embark supports a wide-range of middleboxes such as firewalls, NATs, web proxies, load balancers, and data ex- filtration systems. Our evaluation shows that Embark supports these applications with competitive performance.