Security has been considered as an important issue in processor design. Most of the existing mechanisms address security and integrity issues caused by untrusted main memory in single-core systems. In this paper, we propose a secure Chip-Multiprocessor architecture (SecCMP) to handle security related problems such as key protection and core authentication in multi-core systems. Threshold secret sharing scheme is employed to protect critical keys because secret sharing is a distributed security scheme that matches the nature of multi-core systems. A critical secret is divided and distributed among multiple cores instead of keeping a single copy that is sensitive to exposure. The proposed SecCMP can not only enhance the security and faulttolerance in key protection but also support core authentication. It is designed to be an efficient and secure architecture for CMPs. Categories and Subject Descriptors