SDN-Based Secure Application Admission and Execution for Many-Cores

Abstract

General-purpose many-core system-on-chip (MCSoC) requires support to the execution of dynamic workloads, i.e., admission of new applications at runtime. Some applications may require QoS and security from the MCSoC, not tolerating that malicious tasks or hardware Trojans steal or corrupts their data. A robust method to provide security is to isolate the communication and computation. Most current works employ such isolation in continuous regions named secure zones (SZ). Motivated by the recent study of the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm for MCSoCs, this work proposes to use SDN-based management to implement the communication isolation at runtime. The computation isolation occurs by mapping only tasks of the same application at each core. The communication isolation is supported by the SDN paradigm, which establishes dedicating paths for secure applications. Results show that the SDN-based approach presents a negligible latency to admit and execute a secure application, with a reduced hardware cost and higher computational resources utilization compared to SZs.