Caching Techniques for Security Metadata in Integrity-Protected Fabric-Attached Memories

Abstract

The constant need for larger memories and the diversity of workloads have drove the system vendors away from the conventional processor-centric architecture into a memory-centric architecture. Memorycentric architecture, allows multiple computing nodes to connect to a huge shared memory pool and access it directly. To improve the performance, each node uses a small local memory to cache the data. These architectures introduce several problems when memory encryption and integrity verification are implemented. For instance, using a single integrity tree to protect both memories can introduce unnecessary overheads. Therefore, we propose Split-Tree, which implements a separate integrity tree for each memory. Later, we analyze the system performance, and the security metadata caches behavior when separate trees are used. We use the gathered insights to improve the security metadata caching for the separate trees and ultimately improve the system performance. Received on 16 June 2020; accepted on 07 July 2020; published on 11 August 2020