An Architecture of Security Management Unit for Safe Hosting of Multiple Agents

In such growing areas as remote applications in large public networks, intelligent agent support, intellectual property and copyright protection, the hardware security level offered by existing processors is insufficient. They lack protection mechanisms that prevent the user from tampering critical data owned by those applications. Some devices make exception, but have not enough processing power nor enough memory to stand up to such applications (e.g. smart cards, java cards). This paper proposes an architecture allowing ciphered code execution and ciphered data processing. An internal permanent memory can store cipher keys and critical data for several client agents simultaneously. The result is a secure processor that has hardware support for extensible multitask operating systems, and can be used for both general applications and critical applications needing strong protection. The deciphering unit and the internal permanent memory can be added to an existing CPU core without loss of performance, and do not require it to be modified.