Timelock Drive: Isolated Time-Based Defense for Storage Systems
Talkat 20th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI '26) · 2026-07-13..07-15·
summary
Timelock Drive adds a time lock command to a storage device that makes physical disk blocks immutable for a set duration, forcing attackers to wait. Metadata uses append-only logs with host-cached entries authenticated by freshness counters and hashes, shrinking checker memory from 2 GB -> 1 MB. A small checker in Daphne (≈400 LOC, transpiled to Rust) enforces policies and is formally verified. Recovery requires detection latency shorter than the lock and yields 100% recovery in ransomware VM tests with under 0.5% I/O overhead.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00TimeLock Drive intro
- 1:20Time as data integrity defense
- 3:27Isolated time lock interface
- 4:08Secure versioning with time locks
- 7:39Time lock metadata optimizations
- 9:44Recovery with time guarantees
- 11:51Formal verification & ransomware
- 12:57Negligible storage overhead
- 13:39Host-side metadata caching
- 14:01Conclusion & future directions
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