Dependable Persistent Memory Architecture

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Pramod Bhatotia
• Subject Area: Security and Dependability, Operating-, Communication- and Distributed Systems ; Data Management, Data-Intensive Systems, Computer Science Methods in Business Informatics
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 501680474

Cloud computing hardware infrastructure is going through a dramatic shift to favor the design of high-performance computing systems. In this context, byte-addressable Persistent Memory (PM) is pitched to bridge the gap between volatile main memory and SSDs to build modern data management systems. PM is a non-volatile storage medium, accessible at a byte granularity and has access latencies close to DRAM, while ensuring data durability across system crashes and reboots. While it is advantageous to move our critical data management infrastructure to the cloud, at the same time, it is imperative to provide reliable and trustworthy services in untrusted cloud environments. However, the incorporation of PM in the cloud providers' system stack, despite its performance benefits, introduces new challenging dependability issues, especially in the context of safety and security.To this end, we propose a dependable persistent memory architecture that provides strong safety and security properties in cloud environments. More specifically, our proposal aims to provide comprehensive memory safety for persistent memory by building on software-based deterministic dynamic bounds checking approaches. Further, we aim to provide a secure persistent memory architecture by building on hardware-assisted trusted computing. We strive to achieve these dependability properties while ensuring crash consistency and performance within the realms of the established PM programming model.A tangible outcome of the project is the design and implementation of the end-to-end dependable persistent memory system stack with the following three contributions: (a) a safe PM architecture for ensuring comprehensive memory safety based on persistent shadow memory-based and pointer-based approaches, (b) a secure PM architecture for secure data management for PM based on hardware-trusted computing, (c) a comprehensive evaluation of the entire system stack covering aspects of crash consistency, performance, and dependable properties within the realms of the prominent PMDK programming model for PM.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 2377: Disruptive Main-Memory Technologies