Application Support Architecture for a High-Performance, Programmable Secure Coprocessor

A “secure system” should be secure—but should also 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. 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]).