MIT Researchers Focus on a New Hardware to Protect Data in the Cloud

While cloud technology is being adopted rapidly all over the world, worries about the safety of this technology still remain. Now, you are likely to have fewer worries when storing your sensitive data in the cloud. A new technological invention in hardware could make storing data in the clouds a lot safer, claim researchers from MIT (News - Alert).

This new invention is a secure hardware component called Ascend. It camouflages a server's memory-access patterns and makes it impossible for the attacker to know anything about the data being stored. Ascend also takes care of timing attacks in the cloud. A timing attack tries to infer data by taking into account the time taken to store the data.

Ascend randomly assigns addresses to nodes. This prevents an attacker from inferring anything from sequences of memory access. Also, Ascend reduces the amount of computation required to disguise an address, and thus, prevents timing attacks. The attackers can't tell how long any given computation is taking.

This new hardware could have positive effects on the cloud technology industry. Until now, many small companies and individuals refrained from using cloud because of the worry over safety of their sensitive data. This new invention could take out that worry and we could see more companies and individuals using this technology in the future.

“This is the first time that any hardware design has been proposed that would give you this level of security while only having about a factor of three or four overhead in performance," says Srini Devadas, the Edwin Sibley Webster professor of electrical engineering and computer science, whose group developed the new system. "People would have thought it would be a factor of 100.”

Recently, Researchers at MIT came up with a new system that brings together ferroelectric materials, often used for data storage with grapheme.