Block-level added redundancy explicit authentication for parallelized encryption and integrity checking of processor-memory transactions

  • Authors:
  • Reouven Elbaz;Lionel Torres;Gilles Sassatelli;Pierre Guillemin;Michel Bardouillet;Albert Martinez

  • Affiliations:
  • Intel Corporation, SeCoE, Security Center of Excellence, Hillsboro, OR;University of Montpellier, LIRMM, CNRS, Montpellier, France;University of Montpellier, LIRMM, CNRS, Montpellier, France;STMicroelectronics, Advanced System Technology, Rousset, France;STMicroelectronics, Advanced System Technology, Rousset, France;STMicroelectronics, Advanced System Technology, Rousset, France

  • Venue:
  • Transactions on computational science X
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

The bus between the System on Chip (SoC) and the external memory is one of the weakest points of computer systems: an adversary can easily probe this bus in order to read private data (data confidentiality concern) or to inject data (data integrity concern). The conventional way to protect data against such attacks and to ensure data confidentiality and integrity is to implement two dedicated engines: one performing data encryption and another data authentication. This approach, while secure, prevents parallelizability of the underlying computations. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Block-Level Added Redundancy Explicit Authentication (BL-AREA) and we describe a Parallelized Encryption and Integrity Checking Engine (PE-ICE) based on this concept. BL-AREA and PE-ICE have been designed to provide an effective solution to ensure both security services while allowing for full parallelization on processor read and write operations and optimizing the hardware resources. Compared to standard encryption which ensures only confidentiality, we show that PE-ICE additionally guarantees code and data integrity for less than 4% of run-time performance overhead.