Improved Resource Scheduling for Lightweight SMT-COP

Abstract

Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) processors target resource under-utilization related performance problems of superscalar processors by allowing various datapath resources to be simultaneously shared among several threads with ease. This approach exploits thread-level parallelism on top of the well-studied instruction level parallelism. However, when datapath resources are shared among threads, there is always a possibility that corunning ill-intended programs may try to sniff on other programs with sensitive information like passwords or cryptocurrency information. By stress-testing and measuring many of the shared resources, this is quite achievable. These approaches are known as side-channel attacks. SMT-COP, a study published recently, is a secure architectural implementation based on resource scheduling that prevents these kind of attacks based on execution logic with a modest performance loss of nearly 10%. In this study, we aim to improve SMT-COP’s resource distribution scheme with several approaches, providing a quite close sense of security to that of SMT-COP while improving the performance by up to 8.86% on the average, over the original SMT-COP design.