Design and Characterization of a Hardware Encryption Management Unit for Secure Computing Platforms

Software protection is increasingly necessary for uses in commercial systems, digital content distributors, and military systems. The Secure Software (SecSoft) architecture is one of several architectures attempting to provide hardware enforced software protection. The advantage of the SecSoft architecture is increased software protection without alteration to the fundamental interaction of software, operating systems, and developer tools. This work presents the design, implementation, and performance analysis of a fast, flexible hardware Encryption Management Unit (EMU) for such architectures. The EMU provides selective decryption of software instructions residing in page-sized sections of memory, without modification to the core processor. Results are derived from a FPGA based prototype platform containing different cryptographic routines operating with a standard processor.