Towards Secure, Crash Recoverable and High-Performance Memory Systems in Future Expeditionary Tactical Systems
Abstract
Emerging Non-Volatile Memories (NVMs) are promising memory technologies due to their high capacity, ultra-low idle power, recoverability, and ultra-low latency. Compared to DRAM, NVMs are expected to offer terabytes of memory for the same size of DRAM’s tens of gigabytes, ultra low idle power compared to the high idle power of DRAM due to refresh operations, ability to recover data after power outage (due to non-volatility), however slightly slower than DRAM. Intel’s recent Optane DC PMM is an example of such NVMs. With the high capacity they provide, ultra-low idle power, and ability to recover data after crashes, NVMs promise high availability and high capacity memory in environments restricted in power and size. On the other hand, NVMs suffer from data remanence vulnerabilities, and thus need to have its data integrity and confidentiality protected all the time during operation, especially for defense systems. The project aims to enable secure and efficient integration of emerging non-volatile memories (NVMs) in future expeditionary tactical systems. Emerging NVMs have ultra-low idle power, and can have massive capacities (terabytes). However, protecting it incurs significant performance overheads, recovery time, and security concerns. Our project aims to investigate novel solutions considering the unique nature (SWaP restrictions and high-availability requirements) of expeditionary tactical systems. Key Intellectual Merits: To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to explore the challenges for optimizing recovery time, performance and lifetime of secure NVMs when integrated as a part of main memory along with DRAM. All prior work was focused on NVM being used as the sole memory, which we believe is less likely compared to be part of the main memory along DRAM, as proposed recently by Intel. Such architecture brings in unique challenges for implementing security with low recovery time, high-performance and low write overheads. Moreover, we propose novel approaches for improving the performance of data integrity verification in such hybrid NVM/DRAM systems. Finally, we explore how to implement secure NVM in ultra-low power devices, where hardware support is more restricted. Relevance to Navy: Expeditionary tactical systems are constantly expected to process more data, and maintain energy-efficiency. NVMs uniquely provide crash consistency, very high capacities, energy efficiency (near zero idle power), and ultra-low access latencies. Thus, we expect NVMs to play a major role in future computing systems that require fast access to massive amount of data while ensuring crash recoverability and energy efficiency. Accordingly, we believe that future expeditionary systems will employ emerging NVMs to further boost their computational capacity and energy efficiency. However, such systems require certain security guarantees and availability requirements that we will address through our proposed research, which will make NVMs more suitable and compatible with the requirements of expeditionary tactical systems
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Aug 20, 2021
- Source ID
- N000142112811
Entities
People
- Amro Awad
Organizations
- North Carolina State University
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy