The Maya Cache: A Storage-efficient and Secure Fully-associative Last-level Cache

What is it about?

The last-level cache is vulnerable to cross-core conflict-based attacks as the cache is shared among multiple cores. The state-of-the-art design, named Mirage, provides a strong security guarantee against such attacks, but at the cost of high storage, area, and power overhead. Based on the observation that more than 80% of last-level cache’s data store entries are dead on arrival, we propose Maya, a storage-efficient and yet secure last-level randomized cache that increases the tag store entries for security and reuse detection and uses fewer data store entries that only store the reused data. Our proposal provides a strong security guarantee, with 28.11% less area and 5.46% less static power when compared to a non-secure baseline of 16 MB cache.

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