Biblio

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.

IEC 61850 is an international standard that is widely used in substation automation systems (SAS) in smart grids. During its development, security was not considered thus leaving SAS vulnerable to attacks from adversaries. IEC 62351 was developed to provide security recommendations for SAS against (distributed) denial-of-service, replay, alteration, spoofing and detection of devices attacks. However, real-time communications, which require protocols such as Generic Object-Oriented Substation Event (GOOSE) to function efficiently, cannot implement these recommendations due to latency constraints. There has been researching that sought to improve the security of GOOSE messages, however, some cannot be practically implemented due to hardware requirements while others are theoretical, even though latency requirements were met. This research investigates the possibility of encrypting GOOSE messages with One- Time Pads (OTP), leveraging the fact that encryption/decryption processes require the random generation of OTPs and modulo addition (XOR), which could be a realistic approach to secure GOOSE while maintaining latency requirements. Results show that GOOSE messages can be encrypted with some future work required.