NVMe-over-QUIC: Towards Simplifying Secure NVMe Fabrics for Disaggregation over Unreliable Networks
(2026) IEEE ICNP 2026 — Location: Tempe, Arizona, USA (5.October.2026)
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- Abstract
- With the growing adoption of disaggregated storage, NVMe over Fabrics over TCP has emerged as a practical remote storage solution for enterprise and cloud environments, avoiding the managed lossless networks typically required by RDMA-based deployments. However, neither NVMe/TCP nor NVMe/RDMA provides an efficient built-in security mechanism for protecting storage traffic against eavesdropping in modern data centers and WAN deployments. While NVMe/TCP can be secured using TLS, layering TLS over TCP increases CPU overhead and is subject to TCP head-of-line blocking under lossy or high-latency conditions. This paper presents NVMe-over-QUIC, a redesign of NVMe- oF around a secure, message-oriented, multiplexed transport. Our key insight is to map each NVMe I/O request onto an independent QUIC stream, eliminating redundant framing and enabling true per-command isolation without cross-command head-of-line blocking. By integrating transport and encryption within QUIC, our design also avoids the inefficiencies of TLS over TCP. To preserve scalability on multi-core systems, we design a UDP-based core-affinity architecture aligned with high- performance storage processing models. Evaluation results show up to 4× higher throughput and 10× lower latency under lossy network conditions
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Citations
Kim, S., & Barbette, T. (2026). NVMe-over-QUIC: Towards Simplifying Secure NVMe Fabrics for Disaggregation over Unreliable Networks. 34th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, 34. (Original work published 2026)