Exploring Trustable Paths in Network-on-Chip for Low-Slack Packets
Syam Sankar, Lissiyas Antony, Ruchika Gupta, John Jose, Sukumar Nandi · 2023
The Network-on-Chip (NoC), being an on-chip interconnection fabric for SoCs, is susceptible to malicious attacks due to the general practise of using third-party IPs in its design. Exposure to untrusted third parties can lead to security vulnerabilities like the mounting of Hardware Trojans (HT) in the NoC that are capable of inducing delay attacks on packets. This can impact NoC packet latency and affect the execution time of time-critical applications. We propose trust-based routing for low-slack NoC packets in a multicore framework that has unsecure trust zones. We establish a trust relationship between neighbouring routers. This enables packets to bypass delay-inducing HTs and forward low-slack packets through trustable paths. Experimental results with the SPLASH 2 benchmarks show that our approach reduces the average packet latency by up to 45% in hike by incurring minimal area and power overhead on NoC routers.