Fast Secure Processor for Inhibiting Software Piracy and Tampering

Due to the widespread software piracy and virus attacks, significant efforts have been made to improve security for computer systems. For stand-alone computers, a key observation is that other than the processor, any component is vulnerable to security attacks. Recently, an eXecution Only Memory (XOM) architecture has been proposed to support copy and tamper resistant software. This paper presents an innovative technique in which the cryptography computation is shifted off from the memory access critical path. They performed experiments to study the trade-off between storage size and performance penalty. The technique improves the execution speed of the XOM architecture by 34.7% at maximum.