Source Authentication Techniques for Network-on-Chip Router Configuration Packets

Abstract

It is known that maliciously configured Network-on-Chip routers can enable an attacker to launch different attacks inside a Multiprocessor System-on-Chip. A source authentication mechanism for router configuration packets can prevent such vulnerability. This ensures that a router is configured by the configuration packets sent only by a trusted configuration source. Conventional method like Secure Hash Algorithm-3 (SHA-3) can provide required source authentication in a router but with a router area overhead of 1355.25% compared to a normal router area. We propose eight source authentication mechanisms that can achieve similar level of security as SHA-3 for a router configuration perspective without causing significant area and power increase. Moreover, the processing time of our proposed techniques is 1/100th of SHA-3 implementation. Most of our proposed techniques use different timing channel watermarking methods to transfer source authentication data to the receiver router. We also propose the Individual packet-based stream authentication technique and combinations of this technique with timing channel watermarking techniques. It is shown that, among all of our proposed techniques, maximum router area increment required is 28.32% compared to a normal router.