A non-intrusive and reconfigurable access control to secure NoCs

Abstract

Following the current trend in the semiconductor industry (MPSoC) and the massive advances presented by all things interconnected (Internet of Things), a massive quantity of private and metadata is being transferred through insecure channels. In the industry, almost no attention is given to the amount of data that can be collected from different individuals, just by getting access to their house appliances. With that in mind, this paper proposes a non-intrusive and reconfigurable access control architecture for Networks-on-Chip (NoCs). This architecture comprises firewalls, which are capable of filtering both incoming and outgoing network traffic by analyzing packet information and verifying a traffic initiator's access permission, providing a secure environment that is capable of protecting the user data. The firewalls have approximately 12% of the router area. When the number of routers increases, the firewall area overhead grows slightly, up to only 16% in NoCs with 64 routers.

A Survey on the Security of Wired, Wireless, and 3D Network-on-Chips

“…Memory is divided into regions, and each island can only access its dedicated address range. Few dynamic firewalls have been proposed in the literature [90], [92], [96]. Cioranesco et al [90] argue that authenticated encryption between the initiator and the target imposes a significant latency overhead.…”

“…Fernandes et al [96] have proposed a firewall placed between the NI and the routers' local ports. The firewall offers two security services: i) restricts unauthorized accesses issued by malicious initiators, and ii) compares the NI-produced packet's header-flit with an internal register within the firewall to detect any malicious tampering with the header information.…”

“…Firewall Location Firewall Type Fiorin et al [93] Initiator / Target Static Grammatikatis et al [91] Initiator Static Hu et al [95] Between Routers Static Achballah et al [94] Between Routers Static Kinsy et al [40] Target Static Fiorin et al [92] Initiator / Target Dynamic Cioranesco et al [90] Target Dynamic Fernandes et al [96] Initiator / Target Dynamic of tasks requiring secure communication. SZs are, in fact, network-level facilities to ease intra-group secure communications at the system/application level.…”

Exploring the security landscape: NoC-based MPSoC to Cloud-of-Chips

“…These firewalls can either be static or dynamic. The static firewall has fixed access rules [35] while the re-configurable firewalls update the security policy regularly [43,44,45]. It is assumed that the IP cores inside a security zone trust each other.…”

Towards memory integrity and authenticity of multi-processors system-on-chip using physical unclonable functions

“…Memory protection was previously enforced by security wrappers integrated in the interface between the IP hardware cores and the communication structure as in [18,1,34,10,12,8,11,9,13]. These firewall-based approaches have shown to be an effective isolation mechanism.…”