Publications
Selected peer-reviewed work in computer architecture, security, and reliability.
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Kazi Abu Zubair, Aziz Mohaisen, Amro Awad, “Filesystem Encryption or Direct-Access for NVM Filesystems? Let’s Have Both!”, in 28th IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture.
HPCA-2022Filesystems can be hosted in a fast and emerging Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) and accessed directly using the Direct Access (DAX) feature. Unfortunately, such directly accessed filesystems bypass many filesystem-level operations that are critical in maintaining filesystem security. This work is the first hardware-software co-design that provides filesystem-level security in a DAX filesystem hosted in NVM.
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Kazi Abu Zubair, Sudhanva Gurumurthi, Villas Sridharan, Amro Awad, “Soteria: Towards Resilient Integrity-Protected and Encrypted Non-Volatile Memories” in 54th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture.
MICRO-2021Secure Non-Volatile Memories (NVMs) need to maintain security metadata in NVM, which makes them vulnerable to memory errors. Erroneous security metadata can make gigabytes of data unverifiable and unusable. We show how the availability of security metadata can be significantly improved at an extremely low cost without any complex ECC circuitry.
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Yu Zou, Kazi Abu Zubair, Mazen Alwadi, Rakin Mohammad Shadab, Sanjay Gandham, Amro Awad, Minjie Lin, “ARES: Persistently Secure Non-Volatile Memory with Processor-Transparent and Hardware-Friendly Integrity Verification and Metadata Recovery,”.
ACM TECS, 2021We designed and implemented ARES, a new FPGA-assisted processor-transparent security mechanism. ARES leverages FPGA’s hardware reconfigurability to offload performance-critical, security-related functions to programmable hardware — including a Merkle tree cache architecture with parallel accesses and fully pipelined hashing operations.
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Mazen Alwadi, Kazi Abu Zubair, Aziz Mohaisen, and Amro Awad, “Phoenix: Towards Ultra-Low Overhead, Recoverable, and Persistently Secure NVM,”.
IEEE TDSC, 2020We extend Anubis to further reduce the cost of guaranteeing fast recovery of parallel Tree-of-Counters (ToC).
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Kazi Abu Zubair and Amro Awad, “Ensuring Fast Crash Recovery for Secure NVMs.” in 11th Annual Non-Volatile Memories Workshop.
NVMW-2020 -
Kazi Abu Zubair and Amro Awad, “Anubis: Ultra-Low Overhead and Practical Recovery Time for Secure Non-Volatile Memories.” in 46th International Symposium on Computer Architecture.
ISCA-2019A crash-consistent and secure NVM system must adopt a security metadata recovery mechanism to maintain consistency between data and security metadata — a process that can take hours. Anubis is the first work to propose an ultra-fast recovery mechanism that completes recovery in a fraction of a second.
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Mao Ye, Kazi Abu Zubair, Aziz Mohaisen, and Amro Awad, “Towards Low-Cost Mechanisms to Enable Restoration of Encrypted Non-Volatile Memories,”.
IEEE TDSC, 2019Write-back volatile caching of security metadata improves performance but causes post-crash inconsistency. We propose a low-cost mechanism that recovers encryption counters after a crash by repurposing the ECC functionality.
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Amro Awad, Mao Ye, Yan Solihin, Laurent Njilla and Kazi Abu Zubair, “Triad-NVM: Persistency for Integrity-Protected and Encrypted Non-Volatile Memories.” in 46th International Symposium on Computer Architecture.
ISCA-2019 -
Amro Awad, Suboh Suboh, Kazi Abu Zubair, Mao Ye and Mazen Al-Wadi, “Persistently-Secure Processors: Challenges and Opportunities for Securing Non-Volatile Memories.” in IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI.
ISVLSI-2019