Nicira, Inc.

Amit Chopra

Uday Suresh Masurekar

Chen Li

Bin Qian

Jinqiang Yang

Techniques are disclosed for securing traffic flowing across multi-tenant virtualized infrastructures using group key-based encryption. In one embodiment, an encryption module of a virtual machine (VM) host intercepts layer 2 (L2) frames sent via a virtual NIC (vNIC). The encryption module determines whether the vNIC is connected to a 'secure wire,' and invokes an API exposed by a key management module to encrypt the frames using a group key associated with the secure wire, if any. Encryption may be performed for all frames from the vNIC, or according to a policy. In one embodiment, the encryption module may be located at a layer farthest from the vNIC, and encryption may be transparent to both the VM and a virtual switch. Unauthorized network entities which lack the group key cannot decipher the data of encrypted frames, even if they gain access to such frames.

Growing community of inventors

Palo Alto, CA, United States of America

Amit Chopra