Toward on hardware firewalling of networks-on-chip based systems
Ahmed Ben Achballah, Slim Ben Othman, Slim Ben Saoud · 2017
In the last decade, networks-on-chip (NoC) were proposed as a potential solution to alleviate interconnect challenges posed by bus- or crossbar-based interconnects. In this context, the principal NoC challenges have been for several years on designing reliable and efficient NoC architectures. Today, NoC have found their way on several commercial applications and products indeed, but recently they triggered newer security challenges and alternatives. In this work, we propose a hardware mechanism to secure the data transactions between the NoC routers. The security mechanism is capable of detecting and preventing attacks such as unauthorized accesses that aim on stealing or corrupting sensitive data and denial-of-service (DoS) that aim on degrading the system performances. Two functionalities are considered which are the access control and the verification of the occupation time of the physical links between routers. With respect to previous approaches, our approach don't add extra delays to the data transactions at a reasonable area cost. In addition, it addresses the attacks that can originate from software as well as from hardware such as the NoC routers.