A Comprehensive Survey of Hardware-assisted Security: from the Edge to the Cloud

Sensitive data processing occurs more and more on machines or devices out of users control. In the Internet of Things world, for example, the security of data could be posed at risk regardless the adopted deployment is oriented on Cloud or Edge Computing. In these systems different categories of attacks — such as physical bus sniffing, cold boot, cache side-channel, buffer overflow, code-reuse, or Iago — can be realized. Software-based countermeasures have been proposed. However, the severity and complexity of these attacks require a level of security that only the hardware support can ensure. In the last years, major companies released a number of architectural extensions aiming at provide hardware-assisted security to software. In this paper, we realize a comprehensive survey of HW-assisted technological solutions produced by vendors like Intel, AMD, and ARM for both embedded edge-devices and hosting machines such as cloud servers. The different approaches are classified based on the type of attacks prevented and the enforced techniques. An analysis on their mechanisms, issues, and market adoption is provided to support investigations of researchers approaching to this field of systems security.