Fast Secure Processor for Inhibiting Software Piracy and Tampering

  • Authors:

  • Jun Yang;Youtao Zhang;Lan Gao

  • Affiliations:

  • Computer Science and Engineering Department University of California,Riverside Riverside,CA;Computer Science Department, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson,TX;Computer Science and Engineering Department University of California,Riverside Riverside,CA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 36th annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Due to the widespread software piracy and virus attacks,significant efforts have been made to improve security forcomputer systems. For stand-alone computers, a key observationis that other than the processor, any component isvulnerable to security attacks. Recently, an execution onlymemory (XOM) architecture has been proposed to supportcopy and tamper resistant software [18, 17, 13]. In this design,the program and data are stored in encrypted formatoutside the CPU boundary. The decryption is carried afterthey are fetched from memory, and before they are used bythe CPU. As a result, the lengthened critical path causes aserious performance degradation.In this paper, we present an innovative technique inwhich the cryptography computation is shifted off from thememory access critical path. We propose to use a differentencryption scheme, namely "one-time pad" encryption, toproduce the instructions and data ciphertext. With someadditional on-chip storage, cryptography computations arecarried in parallel with memory accesses, minimizing performancepenalty. We performed experiments to study thetrade-off between storage size and performance penalty.Our technique improves the execution speed of the XOMarchitecture by 34.7% at maximum.