Application Support Architecture for a High-Performance, Programmable Secure CoprocessorTuesday, 10:30, Lincoln-Roosevelt Room
Author
A “secure system” should be secure -- but also should be a system that achieves some particular functionality. A family of secure systems that our group has been investigating (and building) are high-end secure coprocessors: devices that combine a general-purpose computing environment with high-performance cryptography inside a tamper-responding secure boundary. With the appropriate application software, such secure coprocessors can solve security problems that otherwise would be difficult or impossible.
- Sean W. Smith,
- PRESENTATION Joan Dyer,
- Ron Perez,
- Mark Lindemann, all from IBM
In this paper, we examine a high-end secure coprocessor as a system: the programming environment it must provide to support such on-card applications; the software and hardware architecture we developed and implemented to provide this support; and some of the lessons we learned from this development.
This paper is not just an academic exercise, but a case study of commercial research and development (leading to a released product, the IBM 4758 [4]).
Joan Dyer (PhD, Mathematic, NYU) joined IBM Research after an academic career in pure mathematics. She is involved with software design and implementation, currently with the Secure Systems group.