Abstract
Caches have significant impact on an embedded system's performance and energy consumption. As a result, much prior research has focused on cache optimizations to minimize energy consumption and improve performance. Caches are also highly susceptible to side channel attacks, wherein an attacker analyzes leaked information from side channels to extract private information. A key challenge of security mechanisms is that they incur overheads, which can potentially impede optimization goals. Since configurability has been widely studied as a viable and effective cache optimization, we explore using configurability as a moving target defense against cache side channel attacks, while minimizing the attendant overheads of designing secure caches. We present experimental results to show that using configurability as a defense mechanism is very promising, and present future research directions towards enabling secure caches through configurability.