Today for RSA 2025, NVIDIA is adding a new feature for its BlueField-3 DPUs. The NVIDIA DOCA Argus is a new cybersecurity offering that leverages the hardware capabilities of the BlueField-3 to offload security functions from the host.
NVIDIA DOCA Argus Adds New Cybersecurity Functions to NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs
The new NVIDIA DOCA Argus is designed to operate in AI compute nodes and detect and respond to attacks in AI workflows. This is important since AI Agents using RAG often have access to stores of corporate and other proprietary data.
Using the BlueField-3 DPU, Argus uses memory forensics to monitor AI workflows for threats. Since it is a physical Arm-based processor with its own operating system and memory running on the DPU, the BlueField-3 DPU is able to do this in an agentless fashion and NVIDIA says it can be up to 1000x faster than other agentless solutions.
For some context, NVIDIA has been pushing its partners and customers to add BlueField-3 DPUs as part of its north-south networking solution for AI servers. If you see a modern HGX platform or a GB platform, there is likely a BlueField-3 DPU for the north-south traffic and ConnectX or BlueField SuperNICs for the east-west traffic. If you are simply using the BlueField-3 DPU as a standard Ethernet NIC, it uses more power and costs much more than lower-cost 400GbE NICs. As a result, NVIDIA’s customers want to get something beyond what they can get with other NICs, or even the ConnectX-7 NICs found in many systems. Security is one big area that NVIDIA has been pushing for this extra capability and value add.
Final Words
Hopefully one of these days we get a few free minutes to see NVIDIA DOCA Argus in action. We have been covering the NVIDIA BlueField series since RSA 2017 when Mellanox BlueField was more of a NVMeoF solution. It is still a solution that seems like it has more room to grow, and the security angle is certainly one that we expect NVIDIA to leverage going forward. The AI factory is going to be a major area for companies to secure over the next few years.
