Secure Virtual Networks Built with Noise Tunnels and Iroha Key Management

With cyberattacks at an all-time high, new protections are needed for enhancing the security of information systems. As many of these attacks start by exploiting network breaches, securing network access and communications are of the utmost importance. However, the increased usage of mobile devices and cloud resources has made the task of enforcing network security much more complex. With users and resources now deployed everywhere, network security perimeters have become obsolete and this evolution has led to the definition of zero trust network access which enables ubiquitous fine-grained security. In this zero trust context, secure virtual networks (aka overlays) emerge as a powerful paradigm for connecting users and services spread out anywhere on the internet. In this paper, we present a real-world performance evaluation of an architecture which provides secure virtual networks. Our solution enables devices to dynamically modify their connections inside such a secure virtual network, without impacting the security of the end-to-end connection between the user and the service, thus providing mobility above the IP level. Mobility is enabled by defining unique identifiers implemented by a distributed hash table while security is implemented by a Noise protocol variant leveraging public key certificates which are managed through a private blockchain. Experimentation results on a real testbed show that our solution exhibits good performances when compared to a typical TLS-based ZTNA solution.