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Abstract

Cloud infrastructure is experiencing a shift towards disaggregated setups, especially with the introduction of the Compute Express Link (CXL) technology, where byte-addressable ersistent memory (PM) is becoming prominent. To fully utilize the potential of such devices, it is a necessity to access them through network stacks with equivalently high levels of performance (e.g., kernel-bypass, RDMA). While, these advancements are enabling the development of high-performance data management systems, their deployment on untrusted cloud environments also increases the security threats.

To this end, we present Anchor, a library for building secure PM systems. Anchor provides strong hardware-assisted security properties, while ensuring crash consistency. Anchor exposes APIs for secure data management within the realms of the established PM programming model, targeting byte-addressable storage devices. Anchor leverages trusted execution environments (TEE) and extends their security properties on PM. While TEE’s protected memory region provides a strong foundation for building secure systems, the key challenge is that: TEEs are fundamentally incompatible with PM and kernel-bypass networking approaches-in particular, TEEs are neither designed to protect untrusted non-volatile PM, nor the protected region can be accessed via an untrusted DMA connection. To overcome this challenge, we design a PM engine that ensures strong security properties for the PM data, using confidential and authenticated PM data structures, while preserving crash consistency through a secure logging protocol. We further extend the PM engine to provide remote PM data operations via a secure network stack and a formally verified remote attestation protocol to form an end-to-end system. Our evaluation shows that Anchor incurs reasonable overheads, while providing strong security properties.

Citation

@article{ anchor,
  author = {Stavrakakis, Dimitrios and Giantsidi, Dimitra and Bailleu, Maurice and S\"{a}ndig, Philip and Issa, Shady and Bhatotia, Pramod},
  title = {Anchor: A Library for Building Secure Persistent Memory Systems},
  year = {2023},
  issue_date = {December 2023},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  volume = {1},
  number = {4},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3626718},
  doi = {10.1145/3626718},
  journal = {Proc. ACM Manag. Data},
  month = {dec},
  articleno = {231},
  numpages = {31},
  keywords = {dependable systems, persistent memory, secure data management systems, secure kernel-bypass networking, trusted execution environments}
}