Performance Study of Software-based Encrypting Data at Rest

Abstract

Data security is an increasing concern, not only in cloud storage data centers but also in personal computing and memory devices. It is important to maintain the confidentiality of data at rest against ransom and theft attacks. However, securing data, in runtime, into the drives is associated with performance penalties. In this paper, a study of the performance impact for software-based self-encrypting solid-state drives is presented. This performance evaluation is conducted on the NVMe subsystem which supports encryption and decryption of the user data on an I/O command basis. Additionally, this paper demonstrates the potential of encryption and decryption acceleration for data storage in self-encrypting drives.