Memory integrity verification, as addressed in this work, is a core component of modern secure processor architectures — a topic that has only grown in relevance with the increasing need for trusted computing, from cloud services to mobile devices.
Untrusted memory
In this paper, Marten van Dijk and his co-authors — Blaise Gassend, G. Edward Suh, Dwaine Clarke, and Srinivas Devadas — proposed hardware-based techniques to efficiently verify the integrity of untrusted memory, using hash trees and caching. This approach made it possible, for the first time, to ensure memory integrity with acceptable performance overhead, paving the way for practical implementations. Today, these ideas form the foundation of widely deployed technologies such as Intel SGX and Apple Secure Enclave, which protect sensitive computations against tampering and attacks on external memory.
