Biblio

The increasing use of Multiprocessor Systems-on-Chip (MPSoCs) within scalable multi-tenant systems, such as fog/cloud computing, faces the challenge of potential attacks originated by the execution of malicious tasks. Flooding Denial- of-Service (FDoS) attacks are one of the most common and powerful threats for Network-on-Chip (NoC)-based MPSoCs. Since, by overwhelming the NoC, the system is unable to forward legitimate traffic. However, the effectiveness of FDoS attacks depend on the NoC configuration. Moreover, designing a secure MPSoC capable of detecting such attacks while avoiding excessive power/energy and area costs is challenging. To this end, we present two contributions. First, we demonstrate two types of FDoS attacks: based on the packet injection rate (PIR-based FDoS) and based on the packet's payload length (PPL-based FDoS). We show that fair round-robin NoCs are intrinsically protected against PIR-based FDoS. Instead, PPL-based FDoS attacks represent a real threat to MPSoCs. Second, we propose a novel lightweight monitoring method for detecting communication disruptions. Simulation and synthesis results show the feasibility and efficiency of the presented approach.

Design for trust approaches can protect an MPSoC system from hardware Trojan attack due to the high penetration of third-party intellectual property. However, this incurs significant design cost by purchasing IP cores from various IP vendors, and the IP vendors providing particular IP are always limited, making these approaches unable to be performed in practice. This paper treats IP vendor as constraint, and tasks are scheduled with a minimized security constraint violations, furthermore, the area of MPSoC is also optimized during scheduling. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm, by reducing 0.37% security constraint violations.

The rapid development of technology makes it possible for a physical machine to be converted into a virtual machine, which can operate multiple operating systems that are running simultaneously and connected to the internet. DoS/DDoS attacks are cyber-attacks that can threaten the telecommunications sector because these attacks cause services to be disrupted and be difficult to access. There are several software tools for monitoring abnormal activities on the network, such as IDS Snort and IDS Suricata. From previous studies, IDS Suricata is superior to IDS Snort version 2 because IDS Suricata already supports multi-threading, while IDS Snort version 2 still only supports single-threading. This paper aims to conduct tests on IDS Snort version 3.0 which already supports multi-threading and IDS Suricata. This research was carried out on a virtual machine with 1 core, 2 core, and 4 core processor settings for CPU, memory, and capture packet attacks on IDS Snort version 3.0 and IDS Suricata. The attack scenario is divided into 2 parts: DoS attack scenario using 1 physical computer, and DDoS attack scenario using 5 physical computers. Based on overall testing, the results are: In general, IDS Snort version 3.0 is better than IDS Suricata. This is based on the results when using a maximum of 4 core processor, in which IDS Snort version 3.0 CPU usage is stable at 55% - 58%, a maximum memory of 3,000 MB, can detect DoS attacks with 27,034,751 packets, and DDoS attacks with 36,919,395 packets. Meanwhile, different results were obtained by IDS Suricata, in which CPU usage is better compared to IDS Snort version 3.0 with only 10% - 40% usage, and a maximum memory of 1,800 MB. However, the capabilities of detecting DoS attacks are smaller with 3,671,305 packets, and DDoS attacks with a total of 7,619,317 packets on a TCP Flood attack test.

Heterogeneous system-on-chip platforms with multiple processing cores are becoming increasingly common in safety-and security-critical embedded systems. To facilitate a logical isolation of physically connected on-chip components, internal communication links of such platforms are often equipped with dedicated access protection units. When performed manually, however, the configuration of these units can be both time-consuming and error-prone. To resolve this issue, we present a formal model and a corresponding design methodology that allows developers to specify access permissions and information flow requirements for embedded systems in a mostly platform-independent manner. As part of the methodology, the consistency between the permissions and the requirements is automatically verified and an extensible generation framework is used to transform the abstract permission declarations into configuration code for individual access protection units. We present a prototypical implementation of this approach and validate it by generating configuration code for the access protection unit of a commercially available multiprocessor system-on-chip.

Although it has been demonstrated in multiple studies that serious data leaks could occur to many-core systems thanks to the existence of the thermal covert channels (TCC), little has been done to produce effective countermeasures that are necessary to fight against such TCC attacks. In this paper, we propose a three-step countermeasure to address this critical defense issue. Specifically, the countermeasure includes detection based on signal frequency scanning, positioning affected cores, and blocking based on Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling (DVFS) technique. Our experiments have confirmed that on average 98% of the TCC attacks can be detected, and with the proposed defense, the bit error rate of a TCC attack can soar to 92%, literally shutting down the attack in practical terms. The performance penalty caused by the inclusion of the proposed countermeasures is only 3% for an 8×8 system.

The Moving Picture Experts Group's Compact Descriptors for Visual Search (MPEG's CDVS) intends to standardize technologies in order to enable an interoperable, efficient, and cross-platform solution for internet-scale visual search applications and services. Among the key technologies within CDVS, we recall the format of visual descriptors, the descriptor extraction process, and the algorithms for indexing and matching. Unfortunately, these steps require precision and computation accuracy. Moreover, they are very time-consuming, as they need running times in the order of seconds when implemented on the central processing unit (CPU) of modern mobile devices. In this paper, to reduce computation times and maintain precision and accuracy, we re-design, for many-cores embedded graphical processor units (GPUs), all main local descriptor extraction pipeline phases of the MPEG's CDVS standard. To reach this goal, we introduce new techniques to adapt the standard algorithm to parallel processing. Furthermore, to reduce memory accesses and efficiently distribute the kernel workload, we use new approaches to store and retrieve CDVS information on proper GPU data structures. We present a complete experimental analysis on a large and standard test set. Our experiments show that our GPU-based approach is remarkably faster than the CPU-based reference implementation of the standard, and it maintains a comparable precision in terms of true and false positive rates.

Data fusion, as a means to improve aircraft and air traffic safety, is a recent focus of some researchers and system developers. Increases in data volume and processing needs necessitate more powerful hardware and more flexible software architectures to satisfy these needs. Such improvements in processed data also mean the overall system becomes more complex and correspondingly, resulting in a potentially significantly larger cyber-attack space. Today's multicore processors are one means of satisfying the increased computational needs of data fusion-based systems. When coupled with a real-time operating system (RTOS) capable of flexible core and application scheduling, large cabinets of (power hungry) single-core processors may be avoided. The functional and assurance capabilities of such an RTOS can be critical elements in providing application isolation, constrained data flows, and restricted hardware access (including covert channel prevention) necessary to reduce the overall cyber-attack space. This paper examines fundamental considerations of a multiple independent levels of security (MILS) architecture when supported by a multicore-based real-time operating system. The paper draws upon assurance activities and functional properties associated with a previous Common Criteria evaluation assurance level (EAL) 6+ / High-Robustness Separation Kernel certification effort and contrast those with activities performed as part of a MILS multicore related project. The paper discusses key characteristics and functional capabilities necessary to achieve overall system security and safety. The paper defines architectural considerations essential for scheduling applications on a multicore processor to reduce security risks. For civil aircraft systems, the paper discusses the applicability of the security assurance and architecture configurations to system providers looking to increase their resilience to cyber threats.

Locking the functionality of an integrated circuit (IC) thwarts attacks such as intellectual property (IP) piracy, hardware Trojans, overbuilding, and counterfeiting. Although functional locking has been extensively investigated, locking the performance of an IC has been little explored. In this paper, we develop provably-secure performance locking, where only on applying the correct key the IC shows superior performance; for an incorrect key, the performance of the IC degrades significantly. This leads to a new business model, where the companies can design a single IC capable of different performances for different users. We develop mathematical definitions of security and theoretically, and experimentally prove the security against the state-of-the-art-attacks. We implemented performance locking on a FabScalar microprocessor, achieving a degradation in instructions per clock cycle (IPC) of up to 77% on applying an incorrect key, with an overhead of 0.6%, 0.2%, and 0% for area, power, and delay, respectively.

The high penetration of third-party intellectual property (3PIP) brings a high risk of malicious inclusions and data leakage in products due to the planted hardware Trojans, and system level security constraints have recently been proposed for MPSoCs protection against hardware Trojans. However, secret communication still can be established in the context of the proposed security constraints, and thus, another type of security constraints is also introduced to fully prevent such malicious inclusions. In addition, fulfilling the security constraints incurs serious overhead of schedule length, and a two-stage performance-constrained task scheduling algorithm is then proposed to maintain most of the security constraints. In the first stage, the schedule length is iteratively reduced by assigning sets of adjacent tasks into the same core after calculating the maximum weight independent set of a graph consisting of all timing critical paths. In the second stage, tasks are assigned to proper IP vendors and scheduled to time periods with a minimization of cores required. The experimental results show that our work reduces the schedule length of a task graph, while only a small number of security constraints are violated.

We introduce the strictly in-order core (SIC), a timing-predictable pipelined processor core. SIC is provably timing compositional and free of timing anomalies. This enables precise and efficient worst-case execution time (WCET) and multi-core timing analysis. SIC's key underlying property is the monotonicity of its transition relation w.r.t. a natural partial order on its microarchitectural states. This monotonicity is achieved by carefully eliminating some of the dependencies between consecutive instructions from a standard in-order pipeline design. SIC preserves most of the benefits of pipelining: it is only about 6-7% slower than a conventional pipelined processor. Its timing predictability enables orders-of-magnitude faster WCET and multi-core timing analysis than conventional designs.

To be able to meet demanding application performance requirements within a tight power budget, runtime power management must track hardware activity at a very fine granularity in both space and time. This gives rise to sophisticated power management algorithms, which need the underlying system to be both highly observable (to be able to sense changes in instantaneous power demand timely) and controllable (to be able to react to changes in instantaneous power demand timely). The end goal is allocating the power budget, which itself represents a very critical shared resource, in a fair way among active tasks of execution. Fundamentally, if not carefully managed, any system-wide shared resource can give rise to covert communication. Power budget does not represent an exception, particularly as systems are becoming more and more observable and controllable. In this paper, we demonstrate how power management vulnerabilities can enable covert communication over a previously unexplored, novel class of covert channels which we will refer to as POWERT channels. We also provide a comprehensive characterization of the POWERT channel capacity under various sharing and activity scenarios. Our analysis based on experiments on representative commercial systems reveal a peak channel capacity of 121.6 bits per second (bps).

Investigation of hash join algorithm on multi-core and many-core platforms showed that carefully tuned hash join implementations could outperform simple hash joins on most multi-core servers. However, hardware-oblivious hash join has shown competitive performance on many-core platforms. Knights Landing (KNL) has received attention in the field of parallel computing for its massively data-parallel nature and high memory bandwidth, but both hardware-oblivious and hardware-conscious hash join algorithms have not been systematically discussed and evaluated for KNL's characteristics (high bandwidth, cluster mode, etc.). In this paper, we present the design and implementation of the state-of-the-art hardware-oblivious and hardware-conscious hash joins that are tuned to exploit various KNL hardware characteristics. Using a thorough evaluation, we show that:1) Memory allocation strategies based on KNL's architecture are effective for both hardware-oblivious and hardware-conscious hash join algorithms; 2) In order to improve the efficiency of the hash join algorithms, hardware architecture features are still non-negligible factors.

As recently studied, network-on-chip (NoC) suffers growing threats from hardware trojans (HTs), leading to performance degradation or information leakage when it provides communication service in many/multi-core systems. Therefore, defense techniques against NoC HTs experience rapid development in recent years. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are few standard benchmarks developed for the defense techniques evaluation. To address this issue, in this paper, we design a suite of benchmarks which involves multiple NoCs with different HTs, so that researchers can compare various HT defense methods fairly by making use of them. We first briefly introduce the features of target NoC and its infected modules in our benchmarks, and then, detail the design of our NoC HTs in a one-by-one manner. Finally, we evaluate our benchmarks through extensive simulations and report the circuit cost of NoC HTs in terms of area and power consumption, as well as their effects on NoC performance. Besides, comprehensive experiments, including functional testing and side channel analysis are performed to assess the stealthiness of our HTs.

As Multi-Processor Systems-on-Chip (MPSoCs) permeate the Internet by powering IoT devices, they are exposed to new threats. One major threat is Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, which make communication services slow or even unavailable. While mainly studied on desktop and server systems, some DoS attacks on mobile devices and Network-on-Chip (NoC) platforms have also been considered. In the context of NoC-based MPSoC architectures, previous works have explored flooding DoS attacks and their countermeasures, however, these protection techniques are ineffective to mitigate new DoS attacks. Recently, a shift of the network attack paradigm from flooding DoS to Low-and-Slow DoS has been observed. To this end, we present two contributions. First, we demonstrate, for the first time, the impact of Low-and-Slow DoS attacks in NoC environments. Second, we propose a lightweight online monitor able to detect and mitigate these attacks. Results show that our countermeasure is feasible and that it effectively mitigates this new attack. Moreover, since the monitors are placed at the entry points of the network, both, single- and multi-source attacks can be neutralized.

Since the performance of bus interconnects does not scale with the number of processors connected to the bus, chip multiprocessors make use of on-chip networks that implement packet switching and virtual channel flow control to efficiently transport data. In this paper, we consider the test and fault-tolerance aspects of such a network-on-chip (NoC). Past work in this area has addressed the communication efficiency and deadlock-free properties in NoC, but when routing externally received data, aspects of security must be addressed. A malicious denial-of-service attack or a power virus can be launched by a malicious external agent. We propose a two-tier solution to this problem, where a local self-test manager in each processing element runs test algorithms to detect faults in local processing element and its associated physical and virtual channels. At the global level, the health of the NoC is tested using a sorting-based algorithm proposed in this paper. Similarly, we propose to handle fault-tolerance and security concerns in routing at two levels. At the local level, each node is capable of fault-tolerant routing by deflecting packets to an alternate path; when doing so, since a chance of deadlock may be created, the local router must be capable of guestimating a deadlock situation, switch to packet-switching instead of flit-switching and attempt to reroute the packet. At the global level, a routing agent plays the role of gathering fault data and provide the fault-information to nodes that seek this information periodically. Similarly, the agent is capable of detecting malformed packets coming from an external source and prevent injecting such packets into the network, thereby conserving the network bandwidth. The agent also attempts to guess attempts at denial-of-service attacks and power viruses and will reject packets. Use of a two-tier approach helps in keeping the IP modular and reduces their complexity, thereby making them easier to verify.

Globalization of semiconductor design and manufacturing has led to several hardware security issues. The problem of Hardware Trojans (HT) is one such security issue discussed widely in industry and academia. Adversary design engineer can insert the HT to leak confidential data, cause a denial of service attack or any other intention specific to the design. HT in cryptographic modules and processors are widely discussed. HT in Multi-Processor System on Chips (MPSoC) are also catastrophic, as most of the military applications use MPSoCs. Network on Chips (NoC) are standard communication infrastructure in modern day MPSoC. In this paper, we present a novel hardware Trojan which is capable of inducing performance degradation and denial of service attacks in a NoC. The presence of the Hardware Trojan in a NoC can compromise the crucial details of packets communicated through NoC. The proposed Trojan is triggered by a particular complex bit pattern from input messages and tries to mislead the packets away from the destined addresses. A mitigation method based on bit shuffling mechanism inside the router with a key directly extracted from input message is proposed to limit the adverse effects of the Trojan. The performance of a 4×4 NoC is evaluated under uniform traffic with the proposed Trojan and mitigation method. Simulation results show that the proposed mitigation scheme is useful in limiting the malicious effect of hardware Trojan.

Multi-Processor Systems-on-Chips (MPSoCs) are a platform for a wide variety of applications and use-cases. The high on-chip connectivity, the programming flexibility, and the reuse of IPs, however, also introduce security concerns. Problems arise when applications with different trust and protection levels share resources of the MPSoC, such as processing units, cache memories and the Network-on-Chip (NoC) communication structure. If a program gets compromised, an adversary can observe the use of these resources and infer (potentially secret) information from other applications. In this work, we explore the cache-based attack by Bogdanov et al., which infers the cache activity of a target program through timing measurements and exploits collisions that occur when the same cache location is accessed for different program inputs. We implement this differential cache-collision attack on the MPSoC Glass and introduce an optimized variant of it, the Earthquake Attack, which leverages the NoC-based communication to increase attack efficiency. Our results show that Earthquake performs well under different cache line and MPSoC configurations, illustrating that cache-collision attacks are considerable threats on MPSoCs.

NoC (Network-on-Chip) is widely considered and researched by academic communities as a new inter-core interconnection method that replaces the bus. Nowadays, the complexity of on-chip systems is increasing, requiring better communication performance and scalability. Therefore, the optimization of communication performance has become one of the research hotspots. While the NoC is rapidly developing, it is threatened by hardware Trojans inserted during the design or manufacturing processes. This leads to that the attackers can exploit NoC's vulnerability to attack the on-chip systems. To solve the problem, we design and implement a replay-type hardware Trojan inserted into the NoC, aiming to provide a benchmark test set to promote the defense strategies for NoC hardware security. The experiment proves that the power consumption of the designed Trojan accounts for less than one thousandth of the entire NoC power consumption and area. Besides, simulation experiments reveal that this replaytype hardware Trojan can reduce the network throughput.

Continuous development of Network-on-Chip (NoC) enables different types of applications to run efficiently in a Multiprocessor System-on-Chip (MP-SoC). Guaranteed service (GS) can be provided by circuit switching NoC and Best effort service (BES) can be provided by packet switching NoC. A hybrid NoC containing both packet and circuit switching, can provide both types of services to these different applications. But these different applications can be of different security levels and one application can interfere another application's timing characteristics during network transmission. Using this interference, a malicious application can extract secret information from higher security level flows (timing side channel) or two applications can communicate covertly violating the system's security policy (covert timing channel). We propose different mechanisms to protect hybrid routers from timing channel attacks. For design space exploration, we propose three timing channel secure hybrid routers viz. Separate Hybrid (SH), Combined with Separate interface Hybrid (CSH), and Combined Hybrid (CH) routers. Simulation results show that all three routers are secure from timing channel when compared to a conventional hybrid router. Synthesis results show that the area increments compared to a conventional hybrid router are only 7.63, 11.8, and 19.69 percent for SH, CSH, and CH routers respectively. Thus simulation and synthesis results prove the effectiveness of our proposed mechanisms with acceptable area overheads.

pubcrawl, Network on Chip Security, Scalability, resiliency, resilience, metrics, Vulnerabilities and design flaws in Network-on-Chip (NoC) routers can be exploited in order to spy, modify and constraint the sensitive communication inside the Multi-Processors Systems-on-Chip (MPSoCs). Although previous works address the NoC threat, finding secure and efficient solutions to verify the security is still a challenge. In this work, we propose for the first time a method to formally verify the correctness and the security properties of a NoC router in order to provide the proper communication functionality and to avoid NoC attacks. We present a generalized verification flow that proves a wide set of implementation-independent security-related properties to hold. We employ unbounded model checking techniques to account for the highly-sequential behaviour of the NoC systems. The evaluation results demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by presenting verification results of six different NoC routing architectures demonstrating the vulnerabilities of each design.

With increasing integration in SoCs, the Network-on-Chip (NoC) connecting cores and accelerators is of paramount importance to provide low-latency and high-throughput communication. Due to limits to scaling of electrical wires in terms of energy and delay, especially for long multi-mm distances on-chip, alternate technologies such as Wireless Network-on-Chip (WNoC) have shown promise. WNoCs can provide low-latency one-hop broadcasts across the entire chip and can augment point-to-point multi-hop signaling over traditional wired NoCs. Thus, there has been a recent surge in research demonstrating the performance and energy benefits of WNoCs. However, little to no work has studied the additional security and fault tolerance challenges that are unique to WNoCs. In this work, we study potential threats related to denial-of-service, spoofing, and eavesdropping attacks in WNoCs, due to malicious hardware trojans or faulty wireless components. We introduce Prometheus, a dropin solution inside the network interface that provides protection from all three attacks, while adhering to the strict area, power and latency constraints of on-chip systems.

Network-on-Chip (NOC) is the heart of data communication between processing cores in Multiprocessor-based Systems on Chip (MPSoC). Packets transferred via the NoC are exposed to snooping, which makes NoC-based systems vulnerable to security attacks. Additionally, Hardware Trojans (HTs) can be deployed in some of the NoC nodes to apply security threats of extracting sensitive information or degrading the system performance. In this paper, an overview of some security attacks in NoC-based systems and the countermeasure techniques giving prominence on malicious nodes are discussed. Work in progress for secure routing algorithms is also presented.

Network-on-Chip (NoC) is the communication platform of the data among the processing cores in Multiprocessors System-on-Chip (MPSoC). NoC has become a target to security attacks and by outsourcing design, it can be infected with a malicious Hardware Trojan (HT) to degrades the system performance or leaves a back door for sensitive information leaking. In this paper, we proposed a HT model that applies a denial of service attack by deliberately discarding the data packets that are passing through the infected node creating a black hole in the NoC. It is known as Black Hole Router (BHR) attack. We studied the effect of the BHR attack on the NoC. The power and area overhead of the BHR are analyzed. We studied the effect of the locations of BHRs and their distribution in the network as well. The malicious nodes has very small area and power overhead, 1.98% and 0.74% respectively, with a very strong violent attack.

Data analytics and telemetry have become paramount to monitoring and maintaining quality-of-service in addition to business analytics. Stream processing-a model where a network of operators receives and processes continuously arriving discrete elements-is well-suited for these needs. Current and previous studies and frameworks have focused on continuity of operations and aggregate performance metrics. However, real-time performance and tail latency are also important. Timing errors caused by either performance or failed communication faults also affect real-time performance more drastically than aggregate metrics. In this paper, we introduce redundancy in the stream data to improve the real-time performance and resiliency to timing errors caused by either performance or failed communication faults. We also address limitations in previous solutions using a fine-grained acknowledgment tracking scheme to both increase the effectiveness for resiliency to performance faults and enable effectiveness for failed communication faults. Our results show that fine-grained acknowledgment schemes can improve the tail and mean latencies by approximately 30%. We also show that these schemes can improve resiliency to performance faults compared to existing work. Our improvements result in 47.4% to 92.9% fewer missed deadlines compared to 17.3% to 50.6% for comparable topologies and redundancy levels in the state of the art. Finally, we show that redundancies of 25% to 100% can reduce the number of data elements that miss their deadline constraints by 0.76% to 14.04% for applications with high fan-out and by 7.45% up to 50% for applications with no fan-out.

In order to accelerate the image processing speed, in this paper, a multi-core heterogeneous computing technology based on the Xilinx Zynq platform is proposed. The proposed technique could accelerate the real-time video image processing system through hardware acceleration. In order to verify the proposed technique, an Otsu binarized hardware-accelerated IP is designed in FPGA and interacts with ARM through the AXI bus. Compared with the existing homogeneous architecture processor computing, the image processing speed of the proposed technique with multi-core heterogeneous acceleration processing is significantly accelerated.