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

Abstract

Network-on-Chips (NoCs) have been widely used as a scalable communication solution in the design of multiprocessor system-on-chips (MPSoCs). NoCs enable communications between on-chip Intellectual Property (IP) cores and allow processing cores to achieve higher performance by outsourcing their communication tasks. NoC paradigm is based on the idea of resource sharing in which hardware resources, including buffers, communication links, routers, etc., are shared between all IPs of the MPSoC. In fact, the data being routed by each NoC router might not be related to the router's local core. Such a utilization-centric design approach can raise security issues in NoC-based designs, e.g., integrity and confidentiality of the data being routed in an NoC might be compromised by unauthorized accesses/modifications of intermediate routers. Many papers in the literature have discovered and addressed security holes of NoCs, aiming at improving the security of the NoC paradigm. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no solid survey study on the security vulnerabilities and countermeasures for NoCs. This paper will review security threats and countermeasures proposed so far for wired NoCs, wireless NoCs, and 3D NoCs. The paper aims at giving the readers an insight into the attacks and weaknesses/strengths of countermeasures.