SecCMP: Enhancing Critical Secrets Protection in Chip-Multiprocessors

Security has been considered as an important issue in processor design. Most of the existing designs of security handling assume the chip as a single secure unit. However, such assumption is vulnerable to exposure resulted from a central failure point. In this article, we propose a secure Chip-Multiprocessor architecture (SecCMP) to handle security related problems such as key protection and core authentication in multi-core systems. Matching the nature of multi-core systems, a distributed threshold secret sharing scheme is employed to protect critical secrets. A critical secret (e.g., encryption key) is divided into multiple shares and distributed among multiple cores instead of being kept a single copy in one core that is sensitive to exposure. The proposed SecCMP can not only enhance the security and fault-tolerance in secret protection but also support core authentication. SecCMP is designed to be an efficient and secure architecture for CMPs.