MGT: A multi-grained memory hash mechanism for embedded processor

Abstract

Memory integrity verification has been widely used to protect off-chip memory from the tamper attacks. In this paper, we propose a new hash mechanism, multi-grained hash tree (MGT), to optimize the run-time performance of memory integrity verification. This new scheme adopts variable granularities to hash the nodes on different levels, and caches these nodes in a split hash cache. The experimental results indicate that our new multi-grained scheme has 10.8% performance speedup even with a small hash cache, and reduces 53.69% initialization latency on average.