Collaborative Research: CNS Core: Medium: Understanding and Strengthening Memory Security for Non-Volatile Memory

内存安全至关重要。尽管经过数十年的研究，未经授权的内存读写仍然是最常见的安全攻击之一。持久性内存（PM）的出现强化了强内存保护的重要性。作为DRAM作为主存储器的一个有希望的补充或替代品，PM提供更高的密度、更好的扩展潜力、更低的空闲功率和非易失性，同时保留字节寻址性和随机可访问性。但是，与传统内存相比，PM在保护方面存在一些原则性差异：PM保存持久数据，因此数据损坏是持久的，成本更高；没有明显的方法可以从数据损坏中恢复；由于PM数据的寿命很长，随着时间的推移，它的内容和结构以及数据损坏的影响可能会被一个或多个应用程序共享。该项目旨在显著推进对PM内存保护的理解，为持久性意识内存保护建立基础，创建一套保护PM内存的新技术，以及PM损坏的检测、恢复和诊断。由于摩尔定律即将终结，计算机性能的增长正在放缓，而计算机性能的增长曾使许多科学发现和发明成为可能。持久内存（PM）是后摩尔定律时代最有前途的技术之一，有望进入主流计算设备，从物联网设备一直到云。这项研究预测了使用PM的安全漏洞，并试图减轻潜在的安全漏洞，这些漏洞可能会给工业、国防、科学研究、健康和许多其他将依赖于未来计算设备的领域造成巨大损失。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Memory safety is essential. Despite decades of research, unauthorized memory reads and writes are still among the most common security attacks. The emerging persistent memory (PM) amplifies the importance of strong memory protections. As a promising supplement or substitute of DRAM as main memory, PM offers higher density, better scaling potential, lower idle power, and non-volatility, while retaining byte addressability and random accessibility. But PM poses some principled differences for protection in comparison to traditional memory in several ways: PM keeps persistent data so data corruption is persistent and costlier; there is no obvious way to recover from data corruption; due to PM data being long lived, its content and structure and hence the impact of data corruption are likely shared by one or more applications over time. This project aims to significantly advance the understanding of PM memory protection, establish the foundation for persistence-conscious memory protection, create a set of novel techniques for protecting PM memory, and for detection, recovery, and diagnostic of PM corruption. The growth of computer performance that has enabled many scientific discoveries and inventions, is slowing down due to the looming end of Moore’s Law. Persistent memory (PM) is one of promising post-Moore’s Law technology that is expected to get into the mainstream computing devices, from internet of things devices all the way to the cloud. This research anticipates security vulnerabilities of the use of PM and attempts to mitigate potential security breaches that could cause tremendous loss to the industry, defense, scientific research, health, and many other domains that will be relying on future computing devices.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.