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

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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.