Accelerating memory decryption and authentication with frequent value prediction

This paper presents a novel architectural technique to hide fetch latency overhead of hardware encrypted and authenticated memory. A number of recent secure processor designs have used memory block encryption and authentication to protect un-trusted external memory. However, the latency overhead of certain encryption modes or authentication schemes can be intolerably high. This paper proposes novel techniques called frequent value ciphertext speculation and frequent value MAC speculation that synergistically combine value prediction and the inherently pipelined cryptography hardware to address the issue of latency for memory decryption and authentication. Without sacrificing security, frequent value ciphertext speculation can speed up memory decryption or MAC integrity verification by speculatively encrypting predictable memory values and comparing the result ciphertext with the fetched ciphertext. In MAC speculation, a secure processor pre-computes MAC for speculated frequent values ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: CF
• Authors: Weidong Shi, Hsien-Hsin S. Lee
• Keywords: Applied Computing, CF 2007, Ciphertext Speculation, Frequent Values, MAC Speculation