Visible to the public Non-repudiable Disk I/O in Untrusted Kernels

TitleNon-repudiable Disk I/O in Untrusted Kernels
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2017
AuthorsBalakrishnan, Nikilesh, Carata, Lucian, Bytheway, Thomas, Sohan, Ripduman, Hopper, Andy
Conference NameProceedings of the 8th Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems
PublisherACM
Conference LocationNew York, NY, USA
ISBN Number978-1-4503-5197-3
Keywordscomposability, Human Behavior, human factor, Metrics, pubcrawl, Repudiation, resilience, Resiliency, security, SGX, storage
AbstractIt is currently impossible for an application to verify that the data it passes to the kernel for storage is actually submitted to an underlying device or that the data returned to an application by the kernel has actually originated from an underlying device. A compromised or malicious OS can silently discard data written by the application or return fabricated data during a read operation. This is a serious data integrity issue for use-cases where verifiable storage and retrieval of data is a necessary precondition for ensuring correct operation, for example with secure logging, APT monitoring and compliance. We outline a solution for verifiable data storage and retrieval by providing a trustworthy mechanism, based on Intel SGX, to authenticate and verify request data at both the application and storage device endpoints. Even in the presence of a malicious OS our design ensures the authenticity and integrity of data while performing disk I/O and detects any data loss attributable to the untrusted OS fabricating or discarding read and write requests respectively. We provide a nascent prototype implementation for the core system together with an evaluation highlighting the temporal overheads imposed by this mechanism.
URLhttp://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3124680.3124745
DOI10.1145/3124680.3124745
Citation Keybalakrishnan_non-repudiable_2017