Junghee Lee

Jinwoo Ahn, Seungjin Lee, Jinhoon Lee et al.

Privileged malware neutralizes software-based versioning systems and destroys data. To counter this threat, a versioning solid-state drive (SSD) that performs versioning inside the SSD has been studied. An SSD is a suitable candidate for data versioning because it can preserve previous versions without additional copying, and provide high security with a very small trusted computing base (TCB). However, the versioning SSDs studied so far commonly use a full disk versioning method that preserves all file versions in a batch. This paper demonstrates that SSDs, which provide full disk versioning, can be exposed to data tampering attacks when the retention time of data is less than the malware's dwell time. To deal with this threat, we propose SGX-SSD, a policy-based per-file versioning SSD to keep a deeper history for only the important files of users. However, since the SSD isn't aware of a file semantic, and the versioning policy information should be securely received from the untrusted host computer, implementing the per-file versioning in SSD is a huge challenge. To solve this problem, SGX-SSD utilizes the Intel SGX and has a secure host interface to securely receive policy information (configuration values) from the user. Also, to solve the file semantic unawareness problem of the SSD, a piggyback module is designed to give a file hint at the host layer, and an algorithm for selective versioning based on the policy is implemented in the SSD. To prove our system, we prototyped SGX-SSD the Jasmine OpenSSD platform in Linux environment. In the experimental evaluation, we proved that SGX-SSD provides strong security with little additional overhead for selective per-file versioning.

Jinwoo Ahn, Seungjin Lee, Jinhoon Lee et al.

This paper demonstrates that SSDs, which perform device-level versioning, can be exposed to data tampering attacks when the retention time of data is less than the malware's dwell time. To deal with that threat, we propose SGX-SSD, a SGX-based versioning SSD which selectively preserves file history based on the given policy. The proposed system adopts Intel SGX to implement the version policy management system that is safe from high-privileged malware. Based on the policy, only the necessary data is selectively preserved in SSD that prevents files with less priority from wasting space and also ensures the integrity of important files.

Jinwoo Ahn, Donggyu Park, Chang-Gyu Lee et al.

Traditional techniques to prevent damage from ransomware attacks are to detect and block attacks by monitoring the known behaviors such as frequent name changes, recurring access to cryptographic libraries and exchange keys with remote servers. Unfortunately, intelligent ransomware can easily bypass these techniques. Another prevention technique is to recover from the backup copy when a file is infected with ransomware. However, the data backup technique requires extra storage space and can be removed with ransomware. In this paper, we propose to implement an access control mechanism on a disk drive, called a KEY-SSD disk drive. KEY-SSD is the data store and the last barrier to data protection. Unauthorized applications will not be able to read file data even if they bypass the file system defense, thus denying the block request without knowing the disk's registered block key and completely eliminating the possibility of the file becoming hostage to ransomware. We have prototyped KEY-SSD and validated the usefulness of KEY-SSD by demonstrating 1) selective block access control, 2) unauthorized data access blocking and 3) negligible performance overhead. Our comprehensive evaluation of KEY-SSD for various workloads show the KEY-SSD performance is hardly degraded due to OS lightweight key transmission and access control drive optimization. We also confirmed that KEY-SSD successfully protects the files in the actual ransomware sample.