Skip to main content
eScholarship
Open Access Publications from the University of California

UC Davis

UC Davis Previously Published Works bannerUC Davis

Enabling Design Space Exploration for RISC-V Secure Compute Environments

Abstract

Cycle-level architectural simulation of Trusted Execution Environ- ments (TEEs) can enable extensive design space exploration of these secure architectures. Existing architectural simulators which sup- port TEEs are either based on hardware-level implementations or abstract analytic models. In this paper, we describe the implementation of the gem5 models necessary to run and evaluate the RISC- V-based open source TEE, Keystone, and we discuss how this simulation environment opens new avenues for designing and studying these trusted environments. We show that the Keystone simulations on gem5 exhibit similar performance as the previous hardware eval- uations of Keystone. We also describe three simple example use cases (understanding the reason of trusted execution slowdown, performance of memory encryption, and micro-architecture impact on trusted execution performance) to demonstrate how the ability to simulate TEEs can provide useful information about their behavior in the existing form and also with enhanced designs.

Many UC-authored scholarly publications are freely available on this site because of the UC's open access policies. Let us know how this access is important for you.

Main Content
For improved accessibility of PDF content, download the file to your device.
Current View