Authenticated storage using small trusted hardware

  • Authors:
  • Hsin-Jung Yang;Victor Costan;Nickolai Zeldovich;Srinivas Devadas

  • Affiliations:
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA;Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA;Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA;Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2013 ACM workshop on Cloud computing security workshop
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

A major security concern with outsourcing data storage to third-party providers is authenticating the integrity and freshness of data. State-of-the-art software-based approaches require clients to maintain state and cannot immediately detect forking attacks, while approaches that introduce limited trusted hardware (e.g., a monotonic counter) at the storage server achieve low throughput. This paper proposes a new design for authenticating data storage using a small piece of high-performance trusted hardware attached to an untrusted server. The proposed design achieves significantly higher throughput than previous designs. The server-side trusted hardware allows clients to authenticate data integrity and freshness without keeping any mutable client-side state. Our design achieves high performance by parallelizing server-side authentication operations and permitting the untrusted server to maintain caches and schedule disk writes, while enforcing precise crash recovery and write access control.