Resilient System-on-Chip Designs With NoC Fabrics

Abstract

Modern System-on-Chip (SoC) designs integrate a number of third party IPs (3PIPs) that coordinate and communicate through a Network-on-Chip (NoC) fabric to realize system functionality. An important class of SoC security attack involves a rogue IP tampering with the inter-IP communication. These attacks include message snoop, message mutation, message misdirection, IP masquerade, and message flooding. Static IP-level trust verification cannot protect against these SoC-level attacks. In this paper, we analyze the vulnerabilities of system level communication among IPs and develop a novel SoC security architecture that provides system resilience against exploitation by untrusted 3PIPs integrated over an NoC fabric. We show how to address the problem through a collection of fine-grained SoC security policies that enable on-the-fly monitoring and control of appropriate security-relevant events. Our approach, for the first time to our knowledge, provides an architecture-level solution for trusted SoC communication through run-time resilience in the presence of untrusted IPs. We demonstrate viability of our approach on a realistic SoC design through a series of attack models and show that our architecture incurs minimal to modest overhead in area, power, and system latency.