[Resource Topic] 2022/1472: Cryptographic Protection of Random Access Memory: How Inconspicuous can Hardening Against the most Powerful Adversaries be?

Welcome to the resource topic for 2022/1472

Title:
Cryptographic Protection of Random Access Memory: How Inconspicuous can Hardening Against the most Powerful Adversaries be?

Authors: Roberto Avanzi, Ionut Mihalcea, David Schall, Andreas Sandberg

Abstract:

For both cloud and client applications, the protection of the confidentiality and integrity of remotely processed information is an increasingly common feature request. It is also a very challenging goal to achieve with reasonable costs in terms of memory overhead and performance penalty. In turn, this usually leads to security posture compromises in products.

In this paper we review the main technologies that have been proposed so far to address this problem, as well as some new techniques and combinations thereof.
We systematise the treatment of protecting data in use by starting with models of the adversaries, thus allowing us to define different, yet consistent protection levels.
We evaluate the storage and performance impacts and, as far as we are aware for the first time, we consider also the impact on performance when the measured benchmarks are the only running tasks or when they are just one task in an environment with heavy additional random traffic, thus simulating a cloud server under full load.

Using advanced techniques to compress counters can make it viable to store them on-chip – for instance by adding on-chip RAM that can be as small as to 1/256-th of the off-chip RAM. This allows for implementations of memory protection providing full confidentiality, integrity and anti-replay protection with hitherto unattained penalties, especially in combination with the repurposing of ECC bits to store integrity tags. The performance penalty on a memory bus bandwidth saturated server can thus be contained under 1%.

ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1472

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