Systems, apparatus, and/or methods to provide memory data protection. In one example, authenticated encryption may be enhanced via a modification to an authentication code that is associated with encrypted data. The authentication code may be modified, for example, with a nonce value generated for a particular write to memory Decrypted data, generated from the encrypted data, may then be validated based on a modified authentication code. Moreover, data freshness control for data stored in the memory may be provided based on iterative authentication and re-encryption. In addition, a counter used to provide a nonce value may be managed to reduce a size of the counter and/or a growth of the counter.