KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024

To increase data security for cloud and hybrid cloud deployments, many companies, governments, standards, and tenders require data in transit to be protected. However, network encryption comes at a cost - what is the performance impact and how can we reduce it? In this session, we explore how network encryption can be efficiently enforced with Cilium, eBPF, and WireGuard. We dive deep into Cilium’s integration of WireGuard and elaborate on both the management plane and Cilium’s eBPF datapath. We analyze and benchmark what performance cost one can expect and explore opportunities in the Linux kernel to reduce that price. This talk is for operators and security teams that need to encrypt network traffic, but also want to minimize its overhead. The audience will walk away understanding whether network encryption needs to come at a high toll and whether there are opportunities for optimizations.