SA-SPM: An Efficient Compiler for Security Aware Scratchpad Memory (Invited Paper)

Abstract

Scratchpad memories (SPM) are often used to boost the performance of application-specific embedded systems. In embedded systems, main memories are vulnerable to external attacks such as bus snooping or memory extraction. Therefore it is desirable to guarantee the security of data in a main memory. In software-managed SPM, it is possible to provide security in main memory by performing software-assistant encryption.

In this paper, we present an efficient compiler for security aware scratch pad Memory (SA-SPM), which ensures the security of main memories in SPM-based embedded systems. Our compiler is the first approach to support full encryption of memory regions (i.e. stack, heap, code, and static variables) in a SPM-based system. Furthermore, to reduce the energy consumption and improve the lifetime of a non-volatile main memory by decreasing the number of bit flips, we propose a new dual encryption scheme for a SPM-based system. Our experimental results show that the proposed dual encryption scheme reduces the number of bit flips by 31.8% compared with the whole encryption.