Performance optimizations of integrity checking based on Merkle trees

Abstract

Merkle hash trees are used to protect the integrity of data sets, against all kinds of attacks, including replay. They usually imply a significant storage and performance overhead. This paper introduces several proposals (hollow trees, dedicated caches) to mitigate these overheads. They have been implemented in SecBus, a software / hardware architecture protecting the external memories of a System-on-Chip.