Security of Electrical, Optical, and Wireless On-chip Interconnects: A Survey

Abstract

The advancement of manufacturing technologies has enabled the integration of more intellectual property (IP) cores on the same system-on-chip (SoC). Scalable and high throughput on-chip communication architecture has become a vital component in today’s SoCs. Diverse technologies such as electrical, wireless, optical, and hybrid are available for on-chip communication with different architectures supporting them. On-chip communication sub-system is shared across all the IPs and continuously used throughout the lifetime of the SoC. Therefore, the security of the on-chip communication is crucial, because exploiting any vulnerability would be a goldmine for an attacker. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of threat models, attacks, and countermeasures over diverse on-chip communication technologies as well as sophisticated architectures.