Introduction
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Modern networks increasingly rely on advanced network processing functions for a wide spectrum of crucial functions ranging from security (firewalls, IDSes, traffic scrubbers), traffic shaping (rate limiters, load balancers), dealing with address space exhaustion (NATs) or improving the performance of network applications (traffic accelerators, caches, proxies), to name a few. Such “network appliances” or “middleboxes” are a critical piece of the network
infrastructure and represent, to a first-order approximation, the de-facto approach for network evolution in response to changing performance, security, and policy compliance requirements.

However, most of this functionality is implemented in costly, hard-to-modify dedicated hardware, making the network difficult to evolve or adapt to changing traffic requirements. Recent work seeks to address this issue by shifting network processing from a world of dedicated hardware to one where software-based processing runs on virtualized, shared platforms built on commodity hardware servers, switches, and storage. This vision of “software-based” network services enables new in-network functions to be rapidly instantiated, on-demand, and at places in the network where it is most needed, without having to modify the underlying hardware. The scope of this workshop focuses both on the design of the data plane to support advanced services as well as the control plane functions necessary to manage these advanced data plane functions. In some sense, this vision is complementary to ongoing efforts in the SDN community, where the focus has largely been on the control plane and assuming a commodity data plane.

While our workshop builds on the recent promise of realizing high-performance network processing on commodity hardware, many questions remain open:

What are the best virtualization technologies for implementing high-performance network functions?
What are the challenges when trying to push them to rates of 10Gb and beyond?
How do we provide the best possible isolation, both in terms of software isolation but also performance?
How do we ensure that middlebox modules from different entities running on the same platform are assigned to the available hardware in an optimal way?
How can we provide quick instantiation of processing (in the order of milliseconds or less)?
What control plane abstractions are necessary to manage such advanced and stateful services?

The HotMiddlebox workshop will serve as an avenue to showcase and discuss ongoing work from both academic and industry efforts in this space and to identify key challenges and potential solutions, with the ultimate goal of providing a roadmap for practical deployment in operational networks.

Scope of the workshop
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We encourage the submission of work-in-progress papers in the area of middlebox design, implementation, measurement, management, and deployment. We look for submissions of previously unpublished work on topics including, but not limited to, the following:

Performance optimizations of network stacks on virtualized systems
Verification of unknown code running on shared middlebox platforms
Extensible software stacks for rapid implementation of new middlebox functions
Mechanisms for migration of stateful middleboxes
Resource allocation mechanisms for shared/virtualized middlebox platforms
Integrating new software middleboxes into legacy networks
Backend storage/memory architectures for middleboxes
Management abstractions and policy language frameworks for middleboxes
Experiences in deploying software-based middleboxes in operational networks
Connections to Software-Defined Networking
Deployment and use of middleboxes in the cloud
Measurements of middleboxes in enterprise, ISP, and data center networks.
Novel security, performance, and monitoring applications atop middleboxes
Challenges for policy verification in the context of middlebox services.

Important Dates
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Submission: Fri August 30th, 5pm ET
Notification: September 30th
Camera ready: October 24th
Workshop date: December 9, 2013

Co-Chairs
Felipe Huici, NEC Europe
Vyas Sekar, Stony Brook University

Technical Program Committee:
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Aditya Akella, UWisconsin
Katerina Argyraki, EPFL
Jon Crowcroft, Cambridge
Lars Eggert, NetApp
Norbert Egi, Huawei
Mark Handley, University College London
Giuseppe Lettieri, University of Pisa
Diego Lopez, Telefonica
Anil Madhavapeddy, Cambridge
KyoungSoo Park, KAIST
Peter Pietzuch, Imperial
Sylvia Ratnasamy, Berkeley
Jennifer Rexford, Princeton
Luigi Rizzo, University of Pisa
Anees Shaikh, IBM
Robin Sommer, ICSI
Nick Feamster, GTech
Julian Chesterfield, OnApp/XenSource