ANCHOR: A Vision for Secure Persistent Key-Value Stores in Disaggregated Data Centers
DatabasesCryptography and Security
Summary
The authors introduce ANCHOR, a system designed to secure key-value stores that are spread across different machines, which increases the risk of data being tampered with during transport or storage. They propose protecting stored data by encrypting it and tracking versions to prevent old data from being reused. For temporary data like caches, the system only trusts them if they come with proof verified inside a secure processor. The authors also suggest ways to efficiently check data without slowing down the system too much. Overall, their work focuses on maintaining data integrity and freshness despite the challenges of splitting storage and computing resources.
Authors
Viraj Thakkar, Dongha Kim, Hokeun Kim, Zhichao Cao
Abstract
Persistent key-value stores (PKVS) are increasingly deployed in disaggregated settings that split compute, memory, and storage across separate server pools. This shift redraws the trust boundary: data that would remain within a single machine is now transported, cached, and rewritten across multiple hosts, expanding exposure to both network attackers and intra-infrastructure adversaries. This paper presents ANCHOR, a vision for end-to-end integrity and freshness in disaggregated PKVS. ANCHOR proposes a two-part semantics-aware architecture: 1) Persistence path: ANCHOR outlines encrypting and authenticating PKVS persistent files and preventing rollback with manifest versioning. 2) Volatile path: ANCHOR treats caches, indexes, and filters as untrusted hints unless accompanied by verifiable provenance, enforced by a TEE-resident policy. Finally, we outline key invariants and discuss enclave-friendly batching and asynchronous I/O to amortize verification without undermining disaggregation's performance and elasticity benefits.