Wednesday 

Room 1 

13:40 - 14:40 

(UTC+01

Talk (60 min)

Building a lightning fast Firewall with Java & eBPF

eBPF is buzzing all over the cloud native world, as the cutting-edge technology reshaping the way we understand performance, security, and observability within kernel space.

Hacking

Java, with its recent strides in modernization and optimization, from enhancing startup times to facilitating native execution and advancing machine learning applications, stands at the cusp of this transformative era.

Join us in this journey, where we will embark on an ambitious challenge to build a high-throughput firewall leveraging the combined power of eBPF and Java. We'll start with a deep dive into eBPF's capabilities for kernel-level packet manipulation, then transition to how Java's latest advancements, particularly through Project Panama, enable seamless native code invocation and interoperability. Our focus will then converge to a hands-on demonstration of building a simple firewall using eBPF and Java, integrating kernel-level operations with high-level programming for real-time performance enhancements.

Attendees will gain practical insights into deploying eBPF programs from Java using the hello-ebpf library, managing packet flows efficiently, and implementing firewall rules with precision, leveraging the strengths of both worlds.

Johannes Bechberger

Johannes Bechberger is a JVM developer working on profilers and their underlying technology in the SapMachine team at SAP. This includes improvements to async-profiler and its ecosystem, a website to view the different JFR event types, and improvements to the FirefoxProfiler, making it usable in the Java world. He started at SAP in 2022 after two years of research studies at the KIT in Java security analyses. His work today comprises many open-source contributions and his blog, where he regularly writes on in-depth profiling and debugging topics. He also works on hello-ebpf, the first eBPF library for Java.

Since 2023, he's been touring Europe's Java User Groups and conferences, like JavaZone and Devoxx Belgium, to speak on various topics.