Authenticated storage using small trusted hardware

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 t...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Yang, Hsin-Jung (Contributor), Zeldovich, Nickolai (Contributor), Devadas, Srinivas (Contributor), Costan, Victor Marius (Contributor)
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Contributor)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2014-04-14T17:56:32Z.
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Summary: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.