SecDDR: Enabling Low-Cost Secure Memories by Protecting the DDR Interface

• Published in: 2023 53rd Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) pp. 14 - 27
• Main Authors: Fakhrzadehgan, Ali, Ramrakhyani, Prakash, Qureshi, Moinuddin K., Erez, Mattan
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.06.2023
• Subjects: Authentication; Elliptic curve cryptography; Error correction codes; Memory integrity; Memory management; Memory modules; Memory security; Protocols; Replay attacks; Systems architecture
• ISSN: 2158-3927
• DOI: 10.1109/DSN58367.2023.00016

The security goals of cloud providers and users include memory confidentiality and integrity, which requires implementing replay attack protection (RAP). RAP can be achieved using integrity trees or mutually authenticated channels. Integrity trees incur significant performance overheads and are impractical for protecting large memories. Mutually authenticated channels have been proposed only for packetized memory interfaces that address only a very small niche domain, require fundamental changes to memory system architecture, and assume fully-trusted modules. We propose SecDDR, a low-cost RAP that targets direct-attached memories, like DDRx. SecDDR avoids memory-side data authentication, and thus, only adds a small amount of logic to memory components and does not change the underlying DDR protocol, making it practical for widespread adoption. In contrast to prior mutual authentication proposals, which require trusting the entire memory module, SecDDR targets untrusted modules by placing its limited security logic on the DRAM die (or package) of the ECC chip. Our evaluation shows that SecDDR performs within 1% of an encryption-only memory without RAP and that SecDDR provides 18.8% and 7.8% average performance improvements (up to 190.4% and 24.8%) relative to a 64-ary integrity tree and an authenticated channel, respectively.