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

TL;DR

This paper proposes security mechanisms for non-volatile memory systems, especially PCM, to prevent data persistence attacks while balancing performance, power, and endurance considerations.

Contribution

It introduces encryption-based techniques tailored for hybrid DRAM-PCM memory systems to obscure residual data and mitigate persistence threats.

Findings

Differentiated encryption improves security for sensitive data.

The proposed mechanisms incur acceptable performance and power overheads.

Endurance is preserved by avoiding extra write operations.

Abstract

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.