Lightweight Monitoring Scheme for Flooding DoS Attack Detection in Multi-Tenant MPSoCs
Cesar Giovanni Chaves, Johanna Sepúlveda, Thomas Hollstein · 2021
The increasing use of Multiprocessor Systems-on-Chip (MPSoCs) within scalable multi-tenant systems, such as fog/cloud computing, faces the challenge of potential attacks originated by the execution of malicious tasks. Flooding Denial- of-Service (FDoS) attacks are one of the most common and powerful threats for Network-on-Chip (NoC)-based MPSoCs. Since, by overwhelming the NoC, the system is unable to forward legitimate traffic. However, the effectiveness of FDoS attacks depend on the NoC configuration. Moreover, designing a secure MPSoC capable of detecting such attacks while avoiding excessive power/energy and area costs is challenging. To this end, we present two contributions. First, we demonstrate two types of FDoS attacks: based on the packet injection rate (PIR-based FDoS) and based on the packet's payload length (PPL-based FDoS). We show that fair round-robin NoCs are intrinsically protected against PIR-based FDoS. Instead, PPL-based FDoS attacks represent a real threat to MPSoCs. Second, we propose a novel lightweight monitoring method for detecting communication disruptions. Simulation and synthesis results show the feasibility and efficiency of the presented approach.