The proliferation of computers in any domain is followed by the proliferation of malware in that domain. Systems, including the latest mobile platforms, are laden with viruses, rootkits, spyware, adware and other classes of malware. Despite the existence of anti-virus software, malware threats persist and are growing as there exist a myriad of ways to subvert anti-virus (AV) software. In fact, attackers today exploit bugs in the AV software to break into systems.

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.