Securing on-Chip Communications: An On-The-Fly Encryption Architecture for SoCs
Amin Sarihi, Ahmad Patooghy, Mahdi Hasanzadeh, Mostafa Abdelrehim, Abdel‐Hameed A. Badawy · 2021 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI) · 2021
This paper proposes an on-the-fly encryption system that consists of a lightweight encryption architecture and a key-exchange algorithm for secure on-chip communications. The hardware-optimized encryption architecture protects chip-wide communications against a malicious router by applying fast data encryption on packets of interest. The key-exchange algorithm is used to ensure that encryption keys are fully protected from the malicious router. The proposed security solution establishes a trade-off between the achieved security and the imposed overheads through adopting the number of encryption rounds. The two versions of the proposed encryption system, i.e., a best-effort and a full-protection, respectively, offer 99.5% and 100% data protection against the target security threats. While our RTL-level evaluation shows that the maximum area overhead is 19% relative to a baseline router, our network-level simulations show almost no performance overhead.