Architecting Non-Volatile Main Memory to Guard Against Persistence-based Attacks

02/09/2019
by   Fan Yao, et al.
0

DRAM-based main memory and its associated components increasingly account for a significant portion of application performance bottlenecks and power budget demands inside the computing ecosystem. To alleviate the problems of storage density and power constraints associated with DRAM, system architects are investigating alternative non-volatile memory technologies such as Phase Change Memory (PCM) to either replace or be used alongside DRAM memory. While such alternative memory types offer many promises to overcome the DRAM-related issues, they present a significant security threat to the users due to persistence of memory data even after power down. In this paper, we investigate smart mechanisms to obscure the data left in non-volatile memory after power down. In particular, we analyze the effect of using a single encryption algorithm versus differentiated encryption based on the security needs of the application phases. We also explore the effect of encryption on a hybrid main memory that has a DRAM buffer cache plus PCM main memory. Our mechanism takes into account the limited write endurance problem associated with several non-volatile memory technologies including PCM, and avoids any additional writes beyond those originally issued by the applications. We evaluate using Gem5 simulator and SPEC 2006 applications, and show the performance and power overheads of our proposed design.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
03/23/2023

Enabling Design Space Exploration of DRAM Caches in Emerging Memory Systems

The increasing growth of applications' memory capacity and performance d...
research
05/13/2021

Comprehensive Study of Security and Privacy of Emerging Non-Volatile Memories

At the end of Silicon roadmap, keeping the leakage power in tolerable li...
research
04/12/2020

Hardware Memory Management for Future Mobile Hybrid Memory Systems

The current mobile applications have rapidly growing memory footprints, ...
research
07/05/2023

From Ideal to Practice: Data Encryption in eADR-based Secure Non-Volatile Memory Systems

Extended Asynchronous DRAM Refresh (eADR) proposed by Intel extends the ...
research
06/13/2021

Farview: Disaggregated Memory with Operator Off-loading for Database Engines

Cloud deployments disaggregate storage from compute, providing more flex...
research
02/16/2020

Demystifying the Performance of HPC Scientific Applications on NVM-based Memory Systems

The emergence of high-density byte-addressable non-volatile memory (NVM)...
research
10/09/2020

A Survey of Non-Volatile Main Memory Technologies: State-of-the-Arts, Practices, and Future Directions

Non-Volatile Main Memories (NVMMs) have recently emerged as promising te...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset