Processor Cores Feature Improved Security

By Richard Quinnell, EETimes, Sept. 14, 2016 – 

In the escalating war between developers and cybercriminals, processor design needs to continually evolve. In one such evolution, Synopsys has developed next-generation security processor cores with protections that go well beyond encryption. The ARC SEM cores are designed to protect against both passive and invasive attacks aimed at compromising the contents of processor memory.

To handle encryption, the ARC SEM security processor family is designed to use software rather than an encryption engine, according to Angela Raucher, product line manager for ARC EM processors. "Developers of SoCs are looking to save power and area while still implementing security," Raucher said in an interview with EE Times. "These choices are leading to requirements on the processor side to eliminate the crypto core." The new processor cores instead offer an optional crypto pack, Raucher added, which are hardware extensions to help accelerate cryptographic calculations.

It has long been known, however, that running cryptographic algorithms in software can expose secret keys to discovery using passive side-channel attacks. Such attacks monitor the power consumption or radiated emissions from processors and work to infer the secret key by correlating such measurements with the machine's computations while executing the crypto algorithm.

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