TPM-SIM: A framework for performance evaluation of Trusted Platform Modules

This paper presents a simulation toolset for estimating the impact of Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) on the performance of applications that use TPM services, especially in multi-core environments. The proposed toolset, consisting of an integrated CPU/TPM simulator and a set of micro-benchmarks that exercise the major TPM services, can be used to analyze and optimize the performance of TPM-based systems and the TPM itself. In this paper, we consider two such optimizations: (1) exploiting multiple TPMs; and (2) reordering requests within the software stack to minimize queueing delays. Our studies indicate that both techniques result in significant performance improvement, especially as the number of concurrent applications using the TPM increases.