R <scp>ollbaccine</scp> : Herd Immunity against Storage Rollback Attacks in TEEs

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.

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Publication Details

Journal
Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data
Published
2026-04-02
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1145/3786693
Primary Topic
Security and Verification in Computing
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

R ollbaccine : Herd Immunity against Storage Rollback Attacks in TEEs

Heidi Howard, Natacha Crooks, Soujanya Ponnapalli, David Chu et al.
Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data
Security and Verification in Computing
article

R ollbaccine : Herd Immunity against Storage Rollback Attacks in TEEs

Heidi Howard, Natacha Crooks, Soujanya Ponnapalli, David Chu, Lucky Katahanas, Aditya Balasubramanian, Dee Bao
article en

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.

Proceedings of the ACM on Management of DataVol. 4(1)
Microsoft Research (United Kingdom) (GB), University of California, Berkeley (US)
Peace, Justice and strong institutions
Openalex Percentile: Top 21%
Security and Verification in Computing
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