A Secure and Persistent Memory System for Non-volatile Memory

TL;DR

This paper introduces SecPM, a system that ensures both security and persistence in non-volatile memory by combining crash consistency techniques with performance optimizations, achieving significant efficiency improvements.

Contribution

SecPM uniquely integrates crash consistency and performance optimization schemes for secure, persistent memory, addressing limitations of existing independent approaches.

Findings

Reduces write requests by up to 50%

Speeds up transaction execution by 1.3-2.0 times

Achieves near unencrypted memory performance for large transactions

Abstract

In the non-volatile memory, ensuring the security and correctness of persistent data is fundamental. However, the security and persistence issues are usually studied independently in existing work. To achieve both data security and persistence, simply combining existing persistence schemes with memory encryption is inefficient due to crash inconsistency and significant performance degradation. To bridge the gap between security and persistence, this paper proposes SecPM, a Secure and Persistent Memory system, which consists of a counter cache write-through (CWT) scheme and a locality-aware counter write reduction (CWR) scheme. Specifically, SecPM leverages the CWT scheme to guarantee the crash consistency via ensuring both the data and its counter are durable before the data flush completes, and leverages the CWR scheme to improve the system performance via exploiting the spatial locality of counter storage, log and data writes. We have implemented SecPM in gem5 with NVMain and evaluated it using five widely-used workloads. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that SecPM reduces up to half of write requests and speeds up the transaction execution by 1.3-2.0 times via using the CWR scheme, and achieves the performance close to an un-encrypted persistent memory system for large transactions.