Rollbaccine : Herd Immunity against Storage Rollback Attacks in TEEs [Technical Report]

TL;DR

Rollbaccine is a device mapper that automatically provides rollback resistance for all applications in TEEs by ensuring disk consistency, with minimal performance overhead, addressing a critical security gap in current TEE protections.

Contribution

We introduce Rollbaccine, a novel device mapper that guarantees disk consistency after rollbacks, enabling universal rollback resistance without requiring application modifications.

Findings

Rollbaccine adds only 19% overhead on most benchmarks.

It effectively restores disk state during recovery after rollback attacks.

Performs comparably to existing solutions with less overhead.

Abstract

Today, users can "lift-and-shift" unmodified applications into modern, VM-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) in order to gain hardware-based security guarantees. However, TEEs do not protect applications against disk rollback attacks, where persistent storage can be reverted to an earlier state after a crash; existing rollback resistance solutions either only support a subset of applications or require code modification. Our key insight is that restoring disk consistency after a rollback attack guarantees rollback resistance for any application. We present Rollbaccine, a device mapper that provides automatic rollback resistance for all applications by provably preserving disk consistency. Rollbaccine intercepts and replicates writes to disk, restores lost state from backups during recovery, and minimizes overheads by taking advantage of the weak, multi-threaded semantics of disk operations. Rollbaccine performs on-par with state-of-the-art, non-automatic rollback resistant solutions; in fact, across benchmarks over PostgreSQL, HDFS, and two file systems (ext4 and xfs), Rollbaccine adds only 19% overhead, except for the fsync-heavy Filebench Varmail.