Using Address Independent Seed Encryption and Bonsai Merkle Trees to Make Secure Processors OS- and Performance-Friendly ∗ Brian Rogers, Siddhartha Chhabra, Yan Solihin Milos Prvulovic Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering College of Computing North Carolina State University Georgia Institute of Technology {bmrogers, schhabr, solihin}@ncsu.edu
[email protected] Abstract and feasible threat is physical or hardware attacks which involve placing a bus analyzer that snoops data communicated between the In today’s digital world, computer security issues have become processor chip and other chips [7, 8]. Although physical attacks increasingly important. In particular, researchers have proposed may be more difficult to perform than software-based attacks, they designs for secure processors which utilize hardware-based mem- are very powerful as they can bypass any software security protec- ory encryption and integrity verification to protect the privacy and tion employed in the system. The proliferation of mod-chips that integrity of computation even from sophisticated physical attacks. bypass Digital Rights Management protection in game systems has However, currently proposed schemes remain hampered by prob- demonstrated that given sufficient financial payoffs, physical attacks lems that make them impractical for use in today’s computer sys- are very realistic threats. tems: lack of virtual memory and Inter-Process Communication Recognizing these threats, computer architecture researchers support as well as excessive storage and performance overheads. have recently proposed various types of secure processor architec- In this paper, we propose 1) Address Independent Seed Encryption tures [4, 5, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26]. Secure pro- (AISE), a counter-mode based memory encryption scheme using a cessors assume that off-chip communication is vulnerable to attack novel seed composition, and 2) Bonsai Merkle Trees (BMT), a novel and that the chip boundary provides a natural security boundary.