Present but Unreachable: Reducing Persistentlatent Secrets in HotSpot JVM
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2017-01-04
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Applications that manage \ sensitive secrets, including cryptographic keys, are typically \ engineered to overwrite the secrets in memory once they're no longer \ necessary, offering an important defense against forensic attacks \ against the computer. In a modern garbage-collected memory system, \ however, live objects will be copied and compacted into new memory \ pages, with the user program being unable to reach and zero out \ obsolete copies in old memory pages that have not yet \ been reused. This paper considers this problem in the HotSpot JVM, \ the default JVM used by the Oracle and OpenJDK Java platforms. \ We analyze the SerialGC and Garbage First Garbage Collector (G1GC) \ implementations, showing that sensitive data such as TLS keys are \ easily extracted from the garbage. To mitigate this issue, we \ implemented techniques to sanitize older heap pages and we measure \ the performance impact--sometimes good, sometimes unacceptable. We \ also discuss how future garbage collectors might be designed from \ scratch with efficient heap sanitation in mind. \
Description
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Blackbox analysis, Java HotSpot JVM, TLS, Secure Memory Management, Garbage Collection
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10 pages
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Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
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