Securing NoCs Against Timing Attacks with Non-Interference Based Adaptive Routing
Travis Boraten, Avinash K. Kodi · 2018
Timing channel attacks use interference from contending application flows to cause information leakage, and thereby either covertly transmit secrets, or create Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks to undermine the on-chip hardware security. Protecting against timing channel attacks is very challenging since unseen vulnerabilities emerge in newer technology that can be cleverly exploited by malicious applications by intentionally gaming resources to artificially induce interference. In this paper, we propose to secure Network-on-Chips (NoCs) against timing attacks with non-Interference based adaptive routing where we efficiently separate network traffic to not only improve application performance and prevent information leakage. In our performance analysis, we show that the proposed architecture maintains non-interference between security domains, prevents DoS, and improves performance by 2-20% over existing techniques with only a 1.84% power consumption penalty.