This repository contains software that allows to set up communication across an RDMA network that uses network round-trip latency modulation in the remote memory of one of the nodes (intermediary) within an RDMA cluster. The sender software performs the latency modulation that the receiver software can detect and decode by issuing periodic probe packets to the intermediary node.

The full paper by Ustiugov, Petrov, Katebzadeh, and Grot is published at the USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies (WOOT) co-located with USENIX Security Symposium 2020.

This code is provided as-is. You are responsible for protecting yourself, your property and data, and others from any risks caused by this code. This code may not detect vulnerabilities of your applications. This code is only for testing purposes. Use it only on test systems which contain no sensitive data.

1. Turn on 1GB pages on the intermediary. Allocating 6 pages was enough for all our experiments.

2. Install dependencies and load modules on all the machines:

./install_load_modules.sh

3. Install distbenchr (we provide a copy in this repository) on the intermediary. This is the machine from which one will drive the proof-of-concept experiment. Source

4. Set up passwordless ssh between machines.

5. Download this code on intermediary.

6. Set channel parameters in driver.py, namely num_sender_qps, num_sender_requests_per_qp, num_receiver_qps, intermediary_machine, num_sender_reps, and results_file.

7. Set the IP addresses of all three machines, and the path to the code on the intermediary in fabfile.py.