IBC-EI: An Instruction Based Compression method with Encryption and Integrity Checking

Code Compression has been shown to be efficient in minimizing the memory requirements for embedded systems as well as in power consumption reduction and performance improvement. In this paper we devise a code compression method, the IBC-EI (Instruction Based Compression with Encryption and Integrity checking), tailored to provide integrity checking and encryption to secure processor-memory transaction. The principle is to keep the ciphered code compressed in the memory, thus reducing the memory footprint and providing more information per memory access. The results for the Leon Processor and a set of Mediabench and MiBench benchmarks show that the overhead introduced by the code encryption and integrity checking scheme is almost completely eliminated by the compression mechanism.