Special Cloud Security System Built Into Chips

[Guest_Jim_*]

Securing our data can be very important, especially if that data is something sensitive like credit or medical information. This can be tricky to accomplish though, as many systems are moving to the Cloud, where a user's data may be on the same server as an attacker. Two years ago researchers at MIT designed a way to thwart some of these attacks, and now they have successfully built it into chips, which would make actually deploying it much simpler.

Many people may think that so long as data cannot be read, it is protected, but actually attackers can learn a great deal without ever seeing the data. Instead they can look to what a system does with it, such as how it calls the memory. To secure against such attacks, the MIT researchers developed a technique that calls multiple memory addresses at a time, obfuscating what the desired address was from the attacker. This was accomplished by treating all of the addresses as nodes in a tree, with one node immediately above, and several nodes below. When calling one address, the entire path of nodes from it to the top of the tree is called, and so the entire path is written to as well.

By building this method into hardware, it can be run much more efficiently, but to achieve this, the researchers had to develop some interesting tricks. For example, writing to a path on the tree is difficult to do on hardware, because it would normally require sorting. By adding an extra memory circuit though, the information can be stored there and then written to the main memory once its location has been determined. This writing is also done on only ever fifth read, to further improve efficiency.

Source: MIT