The present disclosure relates to system resource management in a variety of situations. The present disclosure provides a method and an apparatus for reducing memory requirements and improving processing speed when an electronic device performs padding for a particular arithmetic operation on data. To achieve the above objective, a method for operating an electronic device according to the present disclosure comprises the steps of: reading a first portion of data from a first memory; determining a first padding address based on the address of a byte belonging to a boundary region of the data among a plurality of bytes included in the first portion; writing values of the plurality of bytes and a value corresponding to the first padding address to a second memory; and reading a second portion of the data from the first memory.