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Securing IOAM in the Linux Kernel: Toward Trustworthy In Situ Network Telemetry#

Netdev 0x1A (Rome, 13-16 July 2026) digest Program Adjacent pick Rome · 13–16 July 2026

Abstract Slides Recording

Maxime Goffart, Emilien Wansart, Benoit Donnet

Play the recording: Securing IOAM in the Linux Kernel: Toward Trustworthy In Situ Network Telemetry

Why: IOAM's security model is "assume the domain boundary holds" — one misconfigured filter and in-band telemetry leaks or, worse, can be forged by an on-path adversary.

What: Encryption and authentication for IOAM data fields, implemented in the Linux kernel with a userspace configuration interface, released open source.

How: An AEAD scheme supporting AES-GCM and ChaCha20-Poly1305 applied to the telemetry carried in IPv6 extension headers, evaluated for its impact on IPv6 forwarding performance. (From abstract only.)

Where applicable: Limited domains that actually run IOAM (ISP or datacenter); the general lesson — boundary-filtering as the only control is a single point of failure — is broader.