Cilium: Network and Application Security with BPF and XDP

Thomas Graf - Co-Founder & CTO, Covalent IO

This talk will start with a deep dive and hands on examples of BPF, possibly the most promising low level technology to address challenges in application and network security, tracing, and visibility. We will discuss how BPF evolved from a simple bytecode language to filter raw sockets for tcpdump to the a JITable virtual machine capable of universally extending and instrumenting both the Linux kernel and user space applications. The introduction is followed by a concrete example of how the Cilium open source project applies BPF to solve networking, security and load balancing for highly distributed applications. We will discuss and demonstrate how Cilium with the help of BPF can be combined with distributed system orchestration such as Docker to simplify security, operations, and troubleshooting of distributed applications.

• Category

  • Science & Technology

• License

  • Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed)