Survey on Secure Persistent Memory Storage

With the rapid development of computer technology, computer security and data privacy protection have always been the focus of academic and industrial. By providing hardware-assisted confidentiality and integrity verification, memory security mechanism helps guarantee the security of application code and data, and prevent them from malicious memory disclosure and modification. The emerging persistent memory delivers a unique combination of affordable large capacity and support for data persistence and provides high-bandwidth and low-latency data access. It can be placed on the memory bus like DRAM and will be accessed via processor loads and stores. However, due to differences in media characteristics, DRAM-oriented memory security mechanisms cannot function efficiently on persistent memory and even have availability issues. Therefore, a secure memory storage system based on persistent memory will bring new opportunities for the secure and efficient memory storage of big data. Firstly, for the write characteristics of persistent memory, the reasons for low-efficiency in applying the security measure against traditional volatile memory to persistent memory are analyzed, and related work is expounded. Secondly, for persistent memory storage, we analyze the problems that need to be considered to ensure the security of persistent memory in its whole life cycle, and introduce research work on guaranteeing the consistency between data and corresponding metadata for security. Finally, we conclude the challenges and compare the related work in building secure memory storage based on persistent memory, and share our views on future research.