arXiv subjects

Biswabandan Panda

Publications and source records attributed to Biswabandan Panda.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

The Avatar Cache: Enabling On-Demand Security with Morphable Cache Architecture

The sharing of the last-level cache (LLC) among multiple cores makes it vulnerable to cross-core conflict- and occupancy-based attacks. Despite extensive prior work, modern processors still employ non-secure set-associative LLCs. Existing secure LLC designs broadly fall into two categories: (i) randomized and (ii) partitioned. The state-of-the-art randomized design, Mirage, mitigates conflict-based attacks but incurs significant area overhead (20% additional storage) and design complexity. Partitioned LLCs mitigate both conflict- and occupancy-based attacks, but often suffer from large performance overheads (on average over 5% and up to 49%), require OS support in set-based schemes, or face scalability issues in way-based schemes. These factors pose major obstacles to the industrial adoption of secure LLCs. This paper asks whether strong LLC security can be achieved with minimal changes to a conventional set-associative LLC, enabling security only when needed while preserving low performance, power, and area overheads. We propose Avatar, a secure and morphable LLC that supports three modes: non-secure (Avatar-N), randomized secure (Avatar-R), and partitioned secure (Avatar-P), and can switch dynamically between them. Avatar closely resembles a conventional set-associative LLC, facilitating industrial adoption. Avatar-R introduces extra invalid entries and leverages high associativity to provide a strong security guarantee with little capacity loss, achieving only one set-associative eviction per $10^{30}$ years, while incurring 1.5% storage overhead, a 2.7% increase in static power, and a 0.2% slowdown over a 16~MB baseline. Avatar-P mitigates both conflict- and occupancy-based attacks with only a 3% performance overhead, substantially outperforming prior way-based partitioned LLCs. When security is unnecessary, Avatar switches to Avatar-N to maximize performance and energy efficiency.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2021

Micro BTB: A High Performance and Lightweight Last-Level Branch Target Buffer for Servers

High-performance branch target buffers (BTBs) and the L1I cache are key to high-performance front-end. Modern branch predictors are highly accurate, but with an increase in code footprint in modern-day server workloads, BTB and L1I misses are still frequent. Recent industry trend shows usage of large BTBs (100s of KB per core) that provide performance closer to the ideal BTB along with a decoupled front-end that provides efficient fetch-directed L1I instruction prefetching. On the other hand, techniques proposed by academia, like BTB prefetching and using retire order stream for learning, fail to provide significant performance with modern-day processor cores that are deeper and wider. We solve the problem fundamentally by increasing the storage density of the last-level BTB. We observe that not all branch instructions require a full branch target address. Instead, we can store the branch target as a branch offset, relative to the branch instruction. Using branch offset enables the BTB to store multiple branches per entry. We reduce the BTB storage in half, but we observe that it increases skewness in the BTB. We propose a skewed indexed and compressed last-level BTB design called MicroBTB (MBTB) that stores multiple branches per BTB entry. We evaluate MBTB on 100 industry-provided server workloads. A 4K-entry MBTB provides 17.61% performance improvement compared to an 8K-entry baseline BTB design with a storage savings of 47.5KB per core.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2021

Introducing Fast and Secure Deterministic Stash Free Write Only Oblivious RAMs for Demand Paging in Keystone

Keystone is a trusted execution environment, based on RISC-V architecture. It divides the memory into a secure Keystone private memory and an unsecure non-Keystone memory, and allows code that lies inside the Keystone private memory to execute securely. Simple demand paging in Keystone ends up leaking sensitive access patterns of Keystone application to the Operating System(OS), that is assumed to be malicious. This is because, to access the unsecure non-Keystone memory, Keystone needs support of the OS. To mitigate this, Keystone needs to implement oblivious demand paging while obfuscating its page access patterns by using Oblivious RAM(ORAM) techniques. This causes substantial slowdown in the application execution. In this paper, we bridge the performance gap between application execution time with unsecure and secure demand paging in Keystone by using Deterministic, stash free, Write only ORAM (DetWoORAM) for oblivious demand paging. We also show why DetWoORAM, that is a write-only ORAM, is sufficient for oblivious demand paging. DetWoORAM logically partitions the memory into a main area and a holding area. The actual pages are stored in main area. We propose two enhancements over DetWoORAM that improves the application execution slowdown. The first enhancement, which we call the Eager DetWoORAM, involves page preloading that exploits the deterministic access pattern of DetWoORAM, and tries to hide the ORAM latency. The second enhancement, which we call the Parallel DetWoORAM, involves spawning multiple threads and each thread performs a part of the DetWoORAM memory access algorithm. Compared to DetWoORAM that shows slowdown of [1.4x, 2x, and 3.24x], Eager DetWoORAM and Parallel DetWoORAM provide slowdown of [1.2x, 1.8x, and 3.2x] and [1.1x, 1.1x, and 1.4x], for k= 3, 7, and 15, respectively.

cs.CR↗