Addressing Cryptographic Overheads in Low-Latency File Systems Through Ahead-of-Time Encryption

• Jorge Pires Correia UFPR
• Wagner Machado N. Zola UFPR

Resumo

Historically, the high latency of storage devices masked the impact of software overheads in the storage stack. However, with the advent of microsecond-scale storage devices, the performance cost of adding new software layers has become more significant. In particular, integrating cryptographic operations into file systems that run on low-latency devices poses substantial challenges. This paper investigates the application of ahead-of-time and speculative encryption techniques to in-kernel file systems, tailored for modern storage devices. Our experimental results demonstrate that these techniques significantly improve both latency and throughput, outperforming current cryptographic file systems.