Examples include techniques for compressing counter values included in cryptographic metadata. In some examples, a cache line to fill a cache included in on-die processor memory may be received. The cache arranged to store cryptographic metadata. The cache line includes a counter value generated by a counter. The counter value to serve as version information for a memory encryption scheme to write a data cache line to a memory location of an off-die memory. In some examples, the counter value is compressed based on whether the counter value includes a pattern that matches a given pattern and is then stored to the cache. In some examples, a compression aware and last recently used (LRU) scheme is used to determine whether to evict cryptographic metadata from the cache.