ECP: Coprocessor Architecture to Protect Program Logic Consistency

Abstract

Contemporary program protection methods focus on safeguarding either program generation, storage, or execution; however, no unified protection strategy exists for ensuring the security of a full program lifecycle. In this study, we combine the static security of program generation with the dynamic security of process execution and propose a novel program logic consistency security property. An encryption core processing (ECP) architecture is presented that provides coprocessor solutions to protect the program logic consistency at the granularity of instructions and data flows. The new authenticated encryption mode in the architecture uses the offset value of the program's instructions and data in relation to the segment-based address as its encryption parameters. Lightweight cryptographic primitives are adopted to ensure that the hardware burden added by the ECP is limited, especially under $\times$64 architectures. We prove that the proposed scheme in the ECP architecture satisfies indistinguishability under chosen plaintext attack and demonstrate the effectiveness of the architecture against various attacks. Additionally, a theoretical performance analysis is provided for estimating the overhead introduced by the ECP architecture.