Fast secure processor for inhibiting software piracy and tampering
- 6 May 2004
- conference paper
- conference paper
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Abstract
Due to the widespread software piracy and virus attacks, significant efforts have been made to improve security for computer systems. For stand-alone computers, a key observation is that other than the processor, any component is vulnerable to security attacks. Recently, an execution only memory (XOM) architecture has been proposed to support copy and tamper resistant software by D. Lie et al. (2000), D. Lie et al. (2003) and T. Gilmont et al. (1999). In this design, the program and data are stored in encrypted format outside the CPU boundary. The decryption is carried after they are fetched from memory, and before they are used by the CPU. As a result, the lengthened critical path causes a serious performance degradation. In this paper, we present an innovative technique in which the cryptography computation is shifted off from the memory access critical path. We propose to use a different encryption scheme, namely "one-time pad" encryption, to produce the instructions and data ciphertext. With some additional on-chip storage, cryptography computations are carried in parallel with memory accesses, minimizing performance penalty. We performed experiments to study the trade-off between storage size and performance penalty. Our technique improves the execution speed of the XOM architecture by 34% at maximum.Keywords
This publication has 12 references indexed in Scilit:
- A 1 GBIT/second GaAs DES chipPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2005
- Specifying and verifying hardware for tamper-resistant softwarePublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2004
- Caches and hash trees for efficient memory integrity verificationPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2003
- Watermarking, tamper-proofing, and obfuscation - tools for software protectionIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2002
- Silent stores and store value localityIEEE Transactions on Computers, 2001
- Architectural support for fast symmetric-key cryptographyPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,2000
- Enhancing security in the memory management unitPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,1999
- Using a high-performance, programmable secure coprocessorLecture Notes in Computer Science, 1998
- The SimpleScalar tool set, version 2.0ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News, 1997
- Hardware protection against software piracyCommunications of the ACM, 1984