Security, Performance and Energy Implications of Hardware-assisted Memory Protection Mechanisms on Event-based Streaming Systems

TL;DR

This paper examines the impact of hardware-assisted memory protection mechanisms on the security, performance, and energy efficiency of event-based streaming systems, highlighting their potential benefits and limitations.

Contribution

It provides an analysis of how hardware-assisted memory protection affects system security, performance, and energy consumption in event-based streaming environments.

Findings

Hardware-assisted memory protection improves security without significant performance loss.

Energy consumption is reduced with hardware-assisted mechanisms.

Performance of streaming systems is maintained or enhanced with certain hardware protections.

Abstract

Major cloud providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft provide nowadays some form of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) which allows deploying services in the form of virtual machines, containers or bare-metal instances. Although software-based solutions like homomorphic encryption exit, privacy concerns greatly hinder the deployment of such services over public clouds. It is particularly difficult for homomorphic encryption to match performance requirements of modern workloads. Evaluating simple operations on basic data types with HElib, a homomorphic encryption library, against their unencrypted counter part reveals that homomorphic encryption is still impractical under realistic workloads.