2020 article

Hardware-Based Domain Virtualization for Intra-Process Isolation of Persistent Memory Objects

2020 ACM/IEEE 47TH ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE (ISCA 2020), pp. 680–692.

By: Y. Xu n, C. Ye*, Y. Solihin* & X. Shen n 

co-author countries: China πŸ‡¨πŸ‡³ United States of America πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡Έ
author keywords: Persistent Memory Objects; Memory Protection Keys; Intra-process Isolation
Source: Web Of Science
Added: March 8, 2021

Persistent memory has appealing properties in serving as main memory. While file access is protected by system calls, an attached persistent memory object (PMO) is one load/store away from accidental (or malicious) reads or writes, which may arise from use of just one buggy library. The recent progress in intra-process isolation could potentially protect PMO by enabling a process to partition sensitive data and code into isolated components. However, the existing intra-process isolations (e.g., Intel MPK) support isolation of only up to 16 domains, forming a major barrier for PMO protections. Although there is some recent effort trying to virtualize MPK to circumvent the limit, it suffers large overhead. This paper presents two novel architecture supports, which provide 11 - 52 Γ— higher efficiency while offering the first known domain-based protection for PMOs.