Enabling Low-Cost Secure Computing on Untrusted In-Memory Architectures

Abstract: Modern computing systems are limited in performance by the memory bandwidth available to processors, a problem known as the memory wall. Processing-in-Memory (PIM) promises to substantially improve this problem by moving processing closer to the data, improving effective data bandwidth, and leading to superior performance on memory-intensive workloads. However, integrating PIM modules within a secure computing system raises an interesting challenge: unencrypted data has to move off-chip to the PIM, exposing the data to attackers and breaking assumptions on Trusted Computing Bases (TCBs). To tackle this challenge, this paper leverages multi-party computation (MPC) techniques, specifically arithmetic secret sharing and Yao's garbled circuits, to outsource bandwidth-intensive computation securely to PIM. Additionally, we leverage precomputation optimization to prevent the CPU's portion of the MPC from becoming a bottleneck. We evaluate our approach using the UPMEM PIM system over various applications such as Deep Learning Recommendation Model inference and Logistic Regression. Our evaluations demonstrate up to a $14.66\times$ speedup compared to a secure CPU configuration while maintaining data confidentiality and integrity when outsourcing linear and/or nonlinear computation.