Architecture of security management unit for safe hosting of multiple agents

Tanguy Gilmont; Jean-Didier Legat; Jean-Jacques Quisquater

doi:10.1117/12.344697

9 April 1999 Architecture of security management unit for safe hosting of multiple agents

Tanguy Gilmont, Jean-Didier Legat, Jean-Jacques Quisquater

Proceedings Volume 3657, Security and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents; (1999) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.344697
Event: Electronic Imaging '99, 1999, San Jose, CA, United States

Abstract

In such growing areas as remote applications in large public networks, electronic commerce, digital signature, intellectual property and copyright protection, and even operating system extensibility, the hardware security level offered by existing processors is insufficient. They lack protection mechanisms that prevent the user from tampering critical data owned by those applications. Some devices make exception, but have not enough processing power nor enough memory to stand up to such applications (e.g. smart cards). This paper proposes an architecture of secure processor, in which the classical memory management unit is extended into a new security management unit. It allows ciphered code execution and ciphered data processing. An internal permanent memory can store cipher keys and critical data for several client agents simultaneously. The ordinary supervisor privilege scheme is replaced by a privilege inheritance mechanism that is more suited to operating system extensibility. The result is a secure processor that has hardware support for extensible multitask operating systems, and can be used for both general applications and critical applications needing strong protection. The security management unit and the internal permanent memory can be added to an existing CPU core without loss of performance, and do not require it to be modified.

Citation Download Citation

Tanguy Gilmont, Jean-Didier Legat, and Jean-Jacques Quisquater "Architecture of security management unit for safe hosting of multiple agents", Proc. SPIE 3657, Security and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents, (9 April 1999); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.344697

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