Practical and Secure Cache Design at Ultra-Low Cost

An overview of the MIRAGE cache design

Guides: Prof. Moinuddin Qureshi, Prof. Biswabandan Panda

MIRAGE is a secure fully-associative last-level cache design which guarantees complete security against eviction-based side-channel attacks, but at a hefty hardware overhead of 17%. MAYA, on the other hand, guarantees the same level of security, at no hardware overhead. It is also able to save around 6% in terms of energy and area compared to the baseline. However, both these designs have a fair bit of additional design complexity, which make them impractical to be adopted by the industry. We propose a framework for a morphable last-level cache design which provides security-on-demand based on the system/user’s security and performance requirements with minimal changes to a traditional LLC.