Enhancing the security of memory in cloud infrastructure through in-phase change memory data randomisation

Abstract

As a promising alternative to dynamic RAM, phase change memory (PCM) suffers from limited write endurance. Therefore, many research proposals on PCM security or reliability have focussed on the possible threat of wear-out attacks from malicious applications. However, it is also found that the non-volatile nature and the programming behaviour of PCM bring other security challenges to the memory system. The authors examine the potential risk of information leakage and theft in memory management for PCM-based cloud server or multitenant systems. By observing the influence of process variation (PV) on PCM cell programming, they propose a fast and efficient in-memory data obfuscation mechanism to defend against memory attacks or information leakage during page reallocation mandated by OS. With the capabilities of in-memory data randomisation, the proposed SecuRAM avoids the long write latency of PCM cells to erase the content, and achieves higher data initialisation efficiency than conventional software solutions. Second, the proposed SecuRAM also provides a novel solution of fast in-memory hardware fingerprinting and random number generation, which are common and essential security functions in encryption or access authentication to protect confidential memory data from attackers. Two novel techniques are proposed to generate signatures and random numbers: the first is based on partial programming, which works in the same way as bulk data randomisation; the second is loop-counting, which is an overhead-free method by reusing the cell programming mechanism in iterate-write PCM devices. Through evaluation, SecuRAM shows a much better performance and energy-efficiency than conventional measures for PCM memory.