Security in MPSoCs: A NoC Firewall and an Evaluation Framework

Abstract

In multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC), a CPU can access physical resources, such as on-chip memory or I/O devices. Along with normal requests, malevolent ones, generated by malicious processes running in one or more CPUs, could occur. A protection mechanism is therefore required to prevent injection of malicious instructions or data across the system. We propose a self-contained Network-on-Chip (NoC) firewall at the network interface (NI) layer which, by checking the physical address against a set of rules, rejects untrusted CPU requests to the onchip memory, thus protecting all legitimate processes running in a multicore SoC. To sustain high performance, we implement the firewall in hardware, with rule-checking performed at segmentlevel based on deny rules. Furthermore, to evaluate its impact, we develop a novel framework on top of gem5 simulation environ- ment, coupling ARM technology and an instance of a commercial point-to-point interconnect from STMicroelectronics (STNoC). Simulation tests include scenarios in which legitimate and malicious processes, running in different CPUs, request access to shared memory. Our results indicate that a firewall implementation at the NI can have a positive effect on network performance by reducing both end-to-end network delay and power consumption.We also show that our coarse-grain firewall can prevent saturation of the on-chip network and performs better than fine-grain alternatives that perform rule checking at page-level. Simulation results are accompanied with field measurements performed on a Zedboard platform running Linux, whereas the NoC Firewall is implemented as a reconfigurable, memory-mapped device on top of AMBA AXI4 interconnect fabric.

DoS Attack Detection and Path Collision Localization in NoC-Based MPSoC Architectures

“…The concept of DoS in the NoC context was introduced in [7]. Subsequently, approaches with different mitigation strategies for these kinds of attacks have been proposed [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. Such approaches can be categorized in two main classes: DoS Avoidance and DoS detection and recovery.…”

“…However, this approach utilizes source-routing, which imposes considerable overhead to the packet size. In [17], Grammatikakis et al target distributed DoS attacks via a firewall in control of configurable access rules in the network interface. The security risk is evaluated by the product of frequency and magnitude of losses (by dropping the packets at the Network Interface).…”

Hardware-Assisted Secure Communication in Embedded and Multi-Core Computing Systems

“…Wassel et al extended this work [26] and proposed a partitioning mechanism through packet scheduling to pass packets between different domains with lower latency. Grammatikakis et al [27] have proposed a self-contained NoC firewall within the network interface by validating the memory requests against the predefined set of rules. Hu et al [28] have also presented a similar solution by incorporating access rules verification and authentication mechanism for certain regions of the memory units.…”

“…In contrast, our proposed security solution does not require modifications in the processor or memory architecture, operates independently without any help from software side and bears minimal performance overhead for NoC-based systems [31]. Security mechanisms for NoC-based multi-core systems (such as [22,24,[27][28][29] have only been designed specifically for shared-memory architectures and provide protection to memory units only whereas our proposed solution can be used to isolate any processing block ranging from memory controllers to other I/O peripherals. Similarly, the hardware-based security solutions, as discussed by Yan et al [11], are based on disabling some unreliable processing cores when sensitive applications are running.…”

Security Enhancements for building saturation-free, low-power NoC-based MPSoCs

“…In several cases this makes the resource-limited STNoC incapable of serving the traffic, which eventually experiences saturation phenomena leading to enormous delays. The experiments were carried out using our gem5-based framework enhanced with a security mechanism placed at the network interface of NoC [1], [2]. This allowed us to explore the implications from enabling security for different parameters.…”