SecPage - A Lightweight Memory Protection Architecture

Protection of memory is very significant for preventing computer system from vulnerabilities, malware or runtime reverse engineering. We introduce SecPage (Secure Page), a new hardware/software memory protection architecture. New architecture provides isolated memory environment to protect sensitive code and data. The security of SecPage mechanism is achieved by adding extensional dedicated instructions and registers into hardware architecture and modifying system software to support the creation and management of isolated memory environment in fine-grained memory page. We demonstrate that SecPage can be achieved without significant performance penalty and the development of SecPage-aware application has minimal modification to existing code. We demonstrate and evaluate the implementation of SecPage can be achieved in low hardware complexity, minimal software modification, and acceptable performance penalty. We use SPEC 2006 benchmark running on GEM5 system simulator to evaluate performance of SecPage. The average of performance loss is 3.1% and the largest loss is 11.1% in IPC.