Abstract
Many-core system-on-chips, together with their established communication infrastructures, Networks-on-Chip (NoC), are growing in complexity, which encourages the integration of third-party components to simplify and accelerate production processes. However, this also adversely exposes the surface for attacks through the injection of hardware Trojans. This work addresses active attacks on NoCs and focuses on the integrity and availability of transmitted data. In particular, we consider the modification and/or dropping of data during transmission as active attacks that might be performed by malicious routers. To mitigate the impact of such active attacks, we propose two lightweight solutions that respect the performance constraints of NoCs. Assuming the presence of symmetric keys, these approaches combine lightweight authentication codes for integrity protection with network coding for increased efficiency and robustness. The proposed solutions prevent undetected modifications and significantly increase availability through a reliable detection of attacks. The efficiency of these solutions is investigated in different scenarios using cycle-accurate simulations and the area overhead is analyzed relative to state-of-the-art many-core system. The results demonstrate that one authentication scheme with network coding protects the integrity of data to a low residual error of 1.36% at 0.2 attack probability with an area overhead of 2.68%. For faster and more flexible evaluation, an analytical approach is developed which is validated against the cycle-accurate simulations. The analytical approach is more than 1000× faster while having a maximum estimation error of 5%. Moreover, the analytical model provides a deeper insight into the system’s behavior. For example, it reveals which factors influence the performance parameters.
Highlights
Solution 1 (S1) has a lower performance in comparison to Solution 2 (S2) since S1 requires greater retransmissions
The results were averaged over 1000 different locations of attacking routers and it was found that these results matched closely with those obtained from the simulations
The results obtained by simulation are greater than those by the analytical model, for S1 G2C3 in which the relatively higher error rates result in many automatic repeat request (ARQ) and retransmissions leading to greater congestion and delay
Summary
We present protocols, which ensure integrity and increase availability in NoCs, even in the presence of HTs in routers [14]. Since message authentication codes are symmetric cryptographic primitives, they require a shared secret between the communicating nodes— This key exchange is out of the scope of this work, but could be realized by pre-sharing keys during an initiation phase. The results demonstrate that our schemes can ensure a secure data transmission in the presence of active attackers by reducing the respective error probability by up to 85.6% at a very reasonable overhead. We propose protocols providing integrity protection and availability enhancement for NoC communications, we subsequently evaluate the performance of these protocols extensive simulations, we develop an analytical model for faster and more flexible evaluation, we analyze our solutions in terms of additional chip area required.
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