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i-NVMM: a secure non-volatile main memory system with incremental encryption

Published: 04 June 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Emerging technologies for building non-volatile main memory (NVMM) systems suffer from a security vulnerability where information lingers on long after the system is powered down, enabling an attacker with physical access to the system to extract sensitive information off the memory. The goal of this study is to find a solution for such a security vulnerability. We introduce i-NVMM, a data privacy protection scheme for NVMM, where the main memory is encrypted incrementally, i.e. different data in the main memory is encrypted at different times depending on whether the data is predicted to still be useful to the processor. The motivation behind incremental encryption is the observation that the working set of an application is much smaller than its resident set. By identifying the working set and encrypting remaining part of the resident set, i-NVMM can keep the majority of the main memory encrypted at all times without penalizing performance by much. Our experiments demonstrate promising results. i-NVMM keeps 78% of the main memory encrypted across SPEC2006 benchmarks, yet only incurs 3.7% execution time overhead, and has a negligible impact on the write endurance of NVMM, all achieved with a relatively simple hardware support in the memory module.

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    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    ISCA '11: Proceedings of the 38th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
    June 2011
    488 pages
    ISBN:9781450304726
    DOI:10.1145/2000064
    • cover image ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News
      ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News  Volume 39, Issue 3
      ISCA '11
      June 2011
      462 pages
      ISSN:0163-5964
      DOI:10.1145/2024723
      Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 04 June 2011

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    Author Tags

    1. hardware attacks
    2. incremental encryption
    3. non-volatile main memory
    4. privacy
    5. security

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    • (2024)Crypto-DSEDA: A Domain-Specific EDA Flow for CiM-Based Cryptographic AcceleratorsIEEE Design & Test10.1109/MDAT.2024.339598741:5(46-54)Online publication date: Oct-2024
    • (2024)Baobab Merkle Tree for Efficient Secure MemoryIEEE Computer Architecture Letters10.1109/LCA.2024.336070923:1(33-36)Online publication date: Jan-2024
    • (2024)A High-Performance and Fast-Recovery Scheme for Secure Non-Volatile Memory Systems2024 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (CLUSTER)10.1109/CLUSTER59578.2024.00046(451-463)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2024
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    • (2023)FeCrypto: Instruction Set Architecture for Cryptographic Algorithms Based on FeFET-Based In-Memory ComputingIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2022.323373642:9(2889-2902)Online publication date: Sep-2023
    • (2023)SecPB: Architectures for Secure Non-Volatile Memory with Battery-Backed Persist Buffers2023 IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)10.1109/HPCA56546.2023.10071082(677-690)Online publication date: Feb-2023
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