Revisiting Challenges for Selective Data Protection of Real Applications

TL;DR

This paper examines technical challenges in applying selective data protection to real applications, proposing solutions, implementing a prototype, and demonstrating its efficiency and security through evaluation.

Contribution

It identifies neglected challenges in real-world selective data protection, offers solutions, and provides a practical prototype with performance evaluation.

Findings

Less than 3% runtime overhead with optimizations

Effective solutions to input channel, granularity, and sensitivity conflicts

Prototype demonstrates security guarantees and efficiency

Abstract

Selective data protection is a promising technique to defend against the data leakage attack. In this paper, we revisit technical challenges that were neglected when applying this protection to real applications. These challenges include the secure input channel, granularity conflict, and sensitivity conflict. We summarize the causes of them and propose corresponding solutions. Then we design and implement a prototype system for selective data protection and evaluate the overhead using the RISC-V Spike simulator. The evaluation demonstrates the efficiency (less than 3% runtime overhead with optimizations) and the security guarantees provided by our system.