Memory predecryption: hiding the latency overhead of memory encryption

ABSTRACT

Memory encryption has become a common approach to providing a secure processing environment, but current schemes suffer from extra performance and storage overheads. This paper presents predecryption as a method of providing this security with less overhead by using well-known prefetching techniques to retrieve data from memory and perform decryption before it is needed by the processor. Our results, tested mostly on SPEC 2000 benchmarks, show that using our predecryption scheme can actually result in no increase in execution time despite an extra 128 cycle decryption latency per memory block access.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.7 INTEGRATED CIRCUITS
      B.7.1 Types and Design Styles
          Subjects: Memory technologies

Additional Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.3 MEMORY STRUCTURES
      B.3.m Miscellaneous

  E. Data
  E.3 DATA ENCRYPTION

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Security