Partitioning a multi-threaded application between a secure and a non-secure memory zone remains a challenge. The current tools rely on data flow analysis techniques, which are unable to handle multi-threaded C or C++ applications. To avoid this limitation, we propose to trade the ease-of-use of data flow analysis for another language construct: explicit secure typing. With secure typing, as with data flow analysis, the developer annotates memory locations that contain sensitive values. However, instead of analyzing how the sensitive values flow, we propose to use these annotations to only check typing rules, such as ensuring that the code never stores a sensitive value in an unsafe memory location. By avoiding data flow analysis, the developer has to annotate more memory locations, but the partitioning tool can handle multi-threaded C and C++ applications.

This paper presents J-NVM, a framework to access efficiently Non-Volatile Main Memory (NVMM) in Java. J-NVM offers a fully-fledged interface to persist plain Java objects using failure-atomic blocks. This interface relies internally on proxy objects that intermediate direct off-heap access to NVMM. The framework also provides a library of highly-optimized persistent data types that resist reboots and power failures. We evaluate J-NVM by implementing a persistent backend for the Infinispan data store. Our experimental results, obtained with a TPC-B like benchmark and YCSB, show that J-NVM is consistently faster than other approaches at accessing NVMM in Java.