Lightweight Authentication for Secure IO Communication in NoC-based Many-cores
Rafael Follmann Faccenda, Gustavo Comarú, Luciano Lores Caimi, Fernando Gehm Moraes · 2023
NoC-based many-cores, with hundreds of IPs, are the current standard in the high-performance electronic industry. The attack surface on these systems increases at the same pace the complexity increases. Delegating security to software mechanisms does not guarantee system integrity, as it leaves the hardware exposed. Thus, adding hardware mechanisms in the many-core design is a requirement to execute applications safely. Proposals available in the literature include firewalls, spatial isolation, crypto cores, and PUFs, neglecting that applications communicate with peripherals, such as hardware accelerators and shared memories. This work presents a method to protect the communication between processing elements and peripherals by using a lightweight authentication process associated with hardware mechanisms for key generation and renewal. Our protocol protects the communication of applications with peripherals and detects attacks such as DoS, spoofing, and eavesdropping. Attack campaigns show the method's effectiveness in blocking such attacks without impairing the application's performance.