Nxp B.v.

Asier Goikoetxea Yanci

Jan Hoogerbrugge

Ventzislav Nikov

Marcel Medwed

A chip for securing storage of information includes a manager to access a pointer and a cipher engine to decrypt stored data. The pointer includes a first area and a second area. The first area includes an address indicating a storage location of the data and the second area includes a safety tag. The cipher engine decrypts the data output from the storage location based on a key and the safety tag in the second area of the pointer. These and other operations may be performed based on metadata that indicate probabilities that a correct safety tag was used to decrypt the data. In another embodiment, the manager may be replaced with an L1 cache.

Probabilistic memory safety using cryptography

A data processing system and method for protecting a memory from unauthorized accesses are provided. The data processing system includes a system bus, a memory coupled to the system bus through a memory controller, and a processing core including a cache system. The memory controller is coupled to the system bus for controlling accesses to the memory that are requested by the processing core. A memory protection circuit uses one or more memory safety violation (MSV) indicators stored in out-of-bounds areas of the memory for detecting when the processing core attempts to access an out-of-bounds area of the memory. The processing core generates an error signal, such as an interrupt, when an attempt to access the out-of-bounds area is detected. The out-of-bounds area may be an unallocated area of the memory. The MSV indicator may be written to the memory by executing a flush instruction of the cache system, and may include the same number of bits as a cache line of the cache system. A data value of the MSV indicator may be a secret data value.

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Glasgow, United Kingdom

Asier Goikoetxea Yanci