D-Shield: Enabling Processor-side Encryption and Integrity Verification for Secure NVMe Drives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of data stored in storage disks is essential to protect users’ sensitive and private data. Recent developments of hardware-based attacks have motivated the need to secure storage data not only at rest but also in transit. Unfortunately, existing techniques such as software-based disk encryption and hardware-based self-encrypting disks fail to offer such comprehensive protection in today’s adversarial settings. With the advances of NVMe SSDs promising ultralow I/O latencies and high parallelism, architecting a storage subsystem that ensures the security of data storage in fast disks without adversely sacrificing their performance is critical.In this paper, we present D-Shield, a processor-side secure framework to holistically protect NVMe storage data confidentiality and integrity with low overheads. D-Shield integrates a novel DMA Interception Engine that allows the processor to perform security metadata maintenance and data protection without any modification to the NVMe protocol and NVMe disks. We further propose optimized D-Shield schemes that minimize decryption/re-encryption overheads for data transfer crossing security domains and utilize efficient in-memory caching of storage metadata to further boost system performance. We implement D-Shield prototypes and evaluate their efficacy using a set of synthetic and real-world benchmarks. Our results show that D-Shield can introduce up to 17× speedup for I/O intensive workloads compared to software-based protection schemes. For server-class database and graph applications, D-Shield achieves up to 96% higher throughput over software-based encryption and integrity checking mechanisms, while providing strong security guarantee against off-chip storage attacks. Meanwhile, D-Shield shows only 6% overhead on effective performance on real-world workloads and has modest in-storage metadata overhead and on-chip hardware cost.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".