Space-Control: Process-Level Isolation for Sharing CXL-based Disaggregated Memory

2026-03-06

AI Summary

This work addresses the security risks arising from the lack of process-level isolation in CXL-based shared memory systems. To bridge the gap between host-level and process-level isolation, the authors propose a hardware-software co-design that, for the first time, enables fine-grained process-level access control and execution context authentication in disaggregated CXL memory. The solution integrates hardware-based attestation, memory access control, and a lightweight caching acceleration mechanism. Evaluated using an SST-based simulation model, the system supports up to 127 concurrent processes with only 3.3% performance overhead, significantly enhancing both the security and efficiency of shared memory architectures.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML
• Application Domains: Security
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Federated Web and WoT systems, including distributed, federated and edge-based data processing
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User privacy protection in personalized systems

Abstract

Memory disaggregation via Compute Express Link (CXL) enables multiple hosts to share remote memory, improving utilization for data-intensive workloads. Today, virtual memory enables process-level isolation on a host and CXL enables host-level isolation. This creates a critical security gap: the absence of process-level memory isolation in shared disaggregated memory. We present Space-Control, a hardware-software co-design that provides fine-grained, process-level isolation for shared disaggregated memory. Space-Control authenticates execution context in the hardware and enforces access control on every memory access and amortizes lookup times with a small cache. Our design allows up to 127 processes Simulation Toolkit (SST) based CXL model, Space-Control incurs minimal performance overhead of 3.3%, making shared disaggregated memory isolation practical.

Problem

• CXL
• memory disaggregation
• process-level isolation
• security gap
• shared memory

Innovation

• process-level isolation
• CXL
• memory disaggregation
• hardware-software co-design
• access control