Architectural support for improving security and performance of memory sub-systems

This thesis explores architectural level optimizations to make secure systems more efficient, secure and affordable. It extends prior work for secure architecture in several areas. It proposes a new combined memory encryption and authentication scheme which uses very small on-chip storage area and incurs much less performance overhead compared with prior work. In addition, the thesis studies the issues of applying architectural support for data security to distributed shared memory systems. It presents a scheme which is scalable with large-scale systems and only introduces negligible performance overhead for confidentiality and integrity protection. Furthermore, the thesis also investigates another source of reducing performance overhead in secure systems through optimizing on-chip caching schemes and minimizing off-chip communications.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Milos Prvulovic; Committee Member: Gabriel Loh; Committee Member: Hyesoon Kim; Committee Member: Umakishore Ramachandran; Committee Member: Yan Solihi