Hardware mechanisms for memory authentication: A survey of existing techniques and engines

Reouven Elbaz, David Champagne, Catherine Gebotys, Ruby B. Lee, Nachiketh Potlapally, Lionel Torres

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

64 Scopus citations

Abstract

Trusted computing platforms aim to proviDe trust in computations performed by sensitive applications. Verifying the integrity of memory contents is a crucial security service that these platforms must proviDe since an adversary able to corrupt the memory space can affect the computations performed by the platform. After a description of the active attacks that threaten memory integrity, this paper surveys existing cryptographic techniques - namely integrity trees - allowing for memory authentication. The strategies proposed in the literature for implementing such trees on general-purpose computing platforms are presented, along with their complexity. This paper also discusses the effect of a potentially compromised Operating System (OS) on computing platforms requiring memory authentication and describes an architecture recently proposed to proviDe this security service despite an untrusted OS. Existing techniques for memory authentication that are not based on trees are described and their performance/ ecurity trade-off is discussed. While this paper focuses on memory authentication for uniprocessor platforms, we also discuss the security issues that arise when considering data authentication in symmetric multiprocessor (shared memory) systems.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationTransactions on Computational Science IV
Subtitle of host publicationSpecial Issue on Security in Computing
Pages1-22
Number of pages22
DOIs
StatePublished - 2009

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume5430 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Computer Science(all)

Keywords

  • Active Attacks
  • Board Level Attacks
  • Integrity Trees
  • Memory Authentication
  • Security
  • Trusted Computing

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