Reconfigurable security architecture for disrupted protection zones in NoC-based MPSoCs

Abstract

Ensuring security in Multi-processors Systems-on-Chip (MPSoCs) leads to several design challenges due to their intrinsic complexity. Distributed and collaborative MPSoC computing forces the application spreading on the computing resources. As a result sensitive information is exchanged among the different computation components through the Networks-on-Chip (NoCs). Security zones can be built for wrapping the sensitive IPs. However, these zones may not always be physically close. In this work we propose for the first time a NoC architecture for creating NoC-based disrupted security zones. A group-wise key agreement technique at NoC level is employed to create secure and dynamic communication channels among the hardware components. We evaluate our approach under synthetic traffic patterns and the execution of SPLASH2 benchmarks. We show that our architecture is able to efficiently manage dynamic security domains while presenting low impact on the performance and cost of MPSoCs.