Salus: Efficient Security Support for CXL-Expanded GPU Memory

GPUs have become indispensable accelerators for many data-intensive applications such as scientific workloads, deep learning models, and graph analytics; these applications share a common demand for increasingly large memory. As the memory capacity connected through traditional memory interfaces is reaching limits, heterogeneous memory systems have gained traction in expanding the memory pool. These systems involve dynamic data movement between different memory locations for efficient utilization, which poses challenges for existing security implementations, whose metadata are tied to the physical location of data. In this work, we propose a new security model specifically designed for systems with dynamic page migration. Our model minimizes the need for security recalculations due to data movement, optimizes security structures for efficient bandwidth utilization, and reduces the overall traffic caused by security operations. Based on our evaluation, our proposed security support improves the GPU throughput by a geometric mean of 29.94% (up to 190.43%) over the conventional security model, and it reduces the security traffic in the memory subsystem to 47.79% on average (as low as 17.71% overhead).