Runtime mitigation of illegal packet request attacks in Networks-on-Chip
Neeli Rashmi Prasad, Rajit Karmakar, Santanu Chattopadhyay, Indrajit Chakrabarti · 2017
A novel Denial-of-Service attack for Networks-on-Chip, namely illegal packet request attack (IPRA), has been proposed and measures to mitigate the same have been addressed. Hardware Trojans, which cause these attacks, are conditionally triggered inside the routers at the buffer sites associated with local core, when the core is idle. These attacks contribute to the degradation of network performance and may even create deadlocks, which can raise serious concerns in time critical systems. A security unit has been proposed to detect these attacks and mitigate the consequent loss by guiding the control units of the corresponding buffers to either isolate or mask the attacked buffers in runtime. Area and power overheads of the proposed secure router are found to be a maximum of 1.69% and 0.63% respectively when compared to a baseline router in a 16×16 Mesh network. The proposed secure router can also improve the normalized execution time as well as energy consumption of benchmark applications under considered IPRAs.