Surveying secure processors

Abstract

Secure computing is gaining importance as computing capability is increasingly becoming distributed and information is available everywhere. Prevention of piracy and digital rights management have become very important and information security is now mandatory rather than an additional feature. Various software schemes have been proposed to provide certain levels of copyright and intellectual property protection but are not completely safe from determined hackers. This has resulted in the need for information security at the hardware level, where secure processors assume importance. Keeping in view these new trends in computing, we review a few representative secure processor designs that are currently in industry and academia. The goal is to present the advantages and pitfalls of various secure processor designs and suggest possible enhancements to the existing secure processor architectures.