With the advances of chip manufacturing technologies, computer architects have been able to integrate an increasing number of processors and other heterogeneous components on the same chip. Network-on-Chip (NoC) is widely employed by multicore System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures to cater to their communication requirements. NoC has received significant attention from both attackers and defenders. The increased usage of NoC and its distributed nature across the chip has made it a focal point of potential security attacks. Due to its prime location in the SoC coupled with connectivity with various components, NoC can be effectively utilized to implement security countermeasures to protect the SoC from potential attacks. There is a wide variety of existing literature on NoC security attacks and countermeasures. In this article, we provide a comprehensive survey of security vulnerabilities in NoC-based SoC architectures and discuss relevant countermeasures.
Advances in manufacturing technologies have enabled System-on-Chip (SoC) designers to integrate an increasing number of cores on a single SoC. Increasing SoC complexity coupled with tight time-to-market deadlines has led to increased utilization of Intellectual Property (IP) cores from third-party vendors. SoC supply chain is widely acknowledged as a major source of security vulnerabilities. Potentially malicious thirdparty IPs integrated on the same Network-on-Chip (NoC) with the trusted components can lead to security and trust concerns. While secure communication is a well-studied problem in the computer networks domain, it is not feasible to implement those solutions on resource-constrained SoCs. In this paper, we present a lightweight encryption and anonymous routing protocol for communication between IP cores in NoC based SoCs. Our method eliminates the major overhead associated with traditional encryption and anonymous routing protocols using a novel secret sharing mechanism while ensuring that the desired security goals are met. Experimental results demonstrate that existing security solutions on NoC can introduce significant (1.5X) performance degradation, whereas our approach provides the same security features with minor (4%) impact on performance.
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