Visible to the public Resilient System-on-Chip Designs With NoC Fabrics

TitleResilient System-on-Chip Designs With NoC Fabrics
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2020
AuthorsDeb Nath, Atul Prasad, Boddupalli, Srivalli, Bhunia, Swarup, Ray, Sandip
JournalIEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
Volume15
Pagination2808–2823
ISSN1556-6021
KeywordsComputer architecture, Computer bugs, Fabrics, IP networks, NoC security, pubcrawl, resilience, Resiliency, resilient architecture, Resilient Security Architectures, security, SoC Security, system-on-chip, trusted SoC, untrusted IPs
AbstractModern System-on-Chip (SoC) designs integrate a number of third party IPs (3PIPs) that coordinate and communicate through a Network-on-Chip (NoC) fabric to realize system functionality. An important class of SoC security attack involves a rogue IP tampering with the inter-IP communication. These attacks include message snoop, message mutation, message misdirection, IP masquerade, and message flooding. Static IP-level trust verification cannot protect against these SoC-level attacks. In this paper, we analyze the vulnerabilities of system level communication among IPs and develop a novel SoC security architecture that provides system resilience against exploitation by untrusted 3PIPs integrated over an NoC fabric. We show how to address the problem through a collection of fine-grained SoC security policies that enable on-the-fly monitoring and control of appropriate security-relevant events. Our approach, for the first time to our knowledge, provides an architecture-level solution for trusted SoC communication through run-time resilience in the presence of untrusted IPs. We demonstrate viability of our approach on a realistic SoC design through a series of attack models and show that our architecture incurs minimal to modest overhead in area, power, and system latency.
NotesConference Name: IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
DOI10.1109/TIFS.2020.2977534
Citation Keydeb_nath_resilient_2020