SDSM: Fast and scalable security support for directory-based distributed shared memory

Abstract

Secure computation is increasingly required, most notably when using public clouds. Many secure CPU architectures have been proposed, mostly focusing on single-threaded applications running on a single node. However, security for parallel and distributed computation is also needed, requiring the sharing of secret data among mutually trusting threads running in different compute nodes in an untrusted environment. We propose SDSM, a novel hardware approach for providing secure directory-based distributed shared memory. Unlike previously proposed schemes that cannot maintain reasonable performance beyond 32 cores, our approach allows secure parallel applications to scale efficiently to thousands of cores.