DiSC: Benchmarking Secure Chip DBMS

Abstract

Secure chips, e.g. present in smart cards, USB dongles, i-buttons, are now ubiquitous in applications with strong security requirements. And they require embedded data management techniques. However, secure chips have severe hardware constraints which make traditional database techniques irrelevant. The main problem faced by secure chip DBMS designers is to be able to assess various design choices and trade-offs for different applications. Our solution is to use a benchmark for secure chip DBMS in order to (1) compare different database techniques, (2) predict the limits of on-chip applications, and (3) provide co-design hints. In this paper, we propose DiSC (Data management in Secure Chip), a benchmark which matches these three objectives. This work benefits from our long experience in developing and tuning data management techniques for the smart card. To validate DiSC, we compare the behavior of candidate data management techniques thanks to a cycle-accurate smart card simulator. Finally, we show the applicability of DiSC to future designs involving new hardware platforms and new database techniques.