A Secure Computing System with Hardware-Efficient Lazy Bonsai Merkle Tree for FPGA-Attached Embedded Memory

With high-impact cyber-attacks on the rise, provisioning cybersecurity to the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) systems typically comprising of modern embedded computing platforms becomes significantly more challenging to achieve. Contemporary secure-memory computing stipulates both content encryption and integrity protection that can seriously impede the computing performance and consume excessive amount of hardware resources. In this paper, we focus on hardware-efficient verification of the memory integrity in the mission-critical computing tasks executing on an FPGA-based secure embedded system, effectively mitigating adversarial attacks such as memory buffer replay. We proposed an innovative partitioned parallel cache structure that leverages the unique reconfigurable capability of modern FPGA devices and successfully circumvents the hardware implementation challenges due to the recursiveness that inherently exists in Merkle tree updating schemes. We designed and implemented a new Bonsai Merkle tree (BMT) lazy update controller specifically designed for FPGA to efficiently exploit the parallelism offered by its reconfigurable fabric. Our experimental results for the new system show up to 95x and 149x latency overhead reduction respectively for write and read and up to 17% better throughput in standard benchmarks compared to software-based approach. Critical system performance is also improved with the lowering of average evictions by up to 8%.