R ollbaccine : Herd Immunity against Storage Rollback Attacks in TEEs

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Authors: David C. Y. Chu, Aditya Balasubramanian, Dee Bao, Natacha Crooks, Heidi Carmen Howard, Lucky Katahanas, Soujanya Ponnapalli
Cited by: 1
References: 37

Abstract

Today, users can ''lift-and-shift'' unmodified applications into modern, VM-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) in order to gain hardware-based security guarantees. However, TEEs do not protect applications against disk rollback attacks, where persistent storage can be reverted to an earlier state after a crash; existing rollback resistance solutions either only support a subset of applications or require code modification. Our key insight is that restoring disk consistency after a rollback attack guarantees rollback resistance for any application. We present R ollbaccine , a device mapper that provides automatic rollback resistance for all applications by provably preserving disk consistency. R ollbaccine intercepts and replicates writes to disk, restores lost state from backups during recovery, and minimizes overheads by taking advantage of the weak, multi-threaded semantics of disk operations. R ollbaccine performs on-par with state-of-the-art, non-automatic rollback resistant solutions; in fact, across benchmarks over PostgreSQL, HDFS, and two file systems (ext4 and xfs), R ollbaccine adds only 19% overhead, except for the fsync-heavy Filebench Varmail.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Security and Verification in Computing Advanced Data Storage Technologies Distributed systems and fault tolerance

Publication details

Journal / source
Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Volume
4
Issue
1
Pages
1–27
Publication date
2 April 2026
Language
EN