Cell Broadband Engine Processor Security Architecture and Features

As computers and consumer electronics devices become more connected, platform security becomes increasingly important for everyone from consumers to businesses. For consumers, privacy of data such as credit card numbers and social security numbers have always been of concern, but now new technologies such as voice-over-IP and personal video blogs bring new privacy concerns. And for entertainment content owners, piracy is a major concern as they move toward a virtual form of TV and movie content delivery (see Resources).

Within this context, the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) (see Resources for more references) offers a processor security architecture that provides a robust foundation for the platform. Until now, because most processor architectures did not provide any security features, security architects relied on software-implemented approaches to provide protection. However, protecting software with software has a fundamental flaw in that the software with the protector role can be compromised as well. Therefore, processor hardware, which is intrinsically less vulnerable than software, needs to be re-thought and re-architected to support the security of the platform. The Cell BE architecture is designed with this goal in mind. Because its designers were given the rare opportunity to design a processor from the ground-up, security is an integral part of the processor architecture and not an after-thought.

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