Design for security is an essential aspect of the design of future computers. However, security is not well understood by the computer architecture community. Many important security aspects have evolved over the last several decades in the cryptography, operating systems, and networking communities. This book attempts to introduce the computer architecture student, researcher, or practitioner to the basic concepts of security and threat-based design. Past work in different security communities can inform our thinking and provide a rich set of technologies for building architectural support for security into all future computers and embedded computing devices and appliances. I have tried to keep the book short, which means that many interesting topics and applications could not be included. What the book focuses on are the fundamental security concepts, across different security communities, that should be understood by any computer architect trying to design or evaluate security-aware computer architectures.
About the Author: Ruby B. Lee is the Forrest G. Hamrick professor of engineering and professor of electrical engineering at Princeton University, with an affiliated appointment in computer science. She is the director of the Princeton Architecture Laboratory for Multimedia and Security (PALMS). Her current research is in designing computer architecture for security and resilience, protecting critical data, securing cloud computing and smartphones, designing trustworthy hardware, secure caches and and secure multicore chips, and security verification. Hardware-enhanced security architectures designed at her PALMS research group include the SP and Bastion secure processor architectures, the Newcache and other secure cache architectures, the NoHype and Hyperwall secure cloud servers, the DataSafe architecture for self-protecting data, and novel instructions for accelerating ciphers and bit permutations. Lee is a fellow of the ACM and the IEEE, and has served as associate editor-in-chief of IEEE Micro, editorial board member of IEEE Security and Privacy and advisory board member of IEEE Spectrum. She has served as the hardware security expert on national committees on cybersecurity research, such as the National Academies committee to help improve cyber security research in the U. S., and as a co-chair for the National Cyber Leap Year summit, which resulted in calls for security research proposal funding from several agencies. She has been granted more than 120 U. S. and international patents, and has authored numerous conference papers with several awards. Prior to joining Princeton, Lee served as chief architect at Hewlett-Packard, responsible at different times for processor architecture, multimedia architecture, and security architecture. She was a founding architect of HP's PA-RISC architecture and instrumental in the initial design of several generations of PA-RISC processors for HP's business and technical computer product lines. She also helped the widespread adoption of multimedia in commodity products by pioneering multimedia support in microprocessors and producing the first real-time software MPEG video in low-end commodity products. She was co-leader of the 64-bit Intel-HP multimedia architecture team. She created the first security roadmap for enterprise and e-commerce security for HP before going to Princeton. Simultaneous with her full-time HP tenure, she was also consulting professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. She has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and an M.S. in computer science, both from Stanford University, and an A.B. with distinction from Cornell University, where she was a College Scholar.