Prabhat Mishra - Network-on-Chip Security and Privacy

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System-on-Chip (SoC) integrates a wide variety of hardware components into a single integrated circuit to provide the backbone of modern computing systems ranging from complex navigation systems in airplanes to simple Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices in smart homes. Cars are full of them, as are airplanes, satellites, and advanced military and medical devices. As applications grow increasingly complex, so do the complexities of the SoCs. For example, a typical automotive SoC may include 100200 diverse components (e.g., processor, memory, controllers, and converters) from multiple third-party vendors. Network-on-Chip (NoC) is a widely used solution for on-chip communication between various components in complex SoCs.

SoCs are designed today using Intellectual Property (IP) components to reduce cost while meeting aggressive time-to-market constraints. Growing reliance on these pre-verified components, often gathered from untrusted third-party vendors, severely affects the security and trustworthiness of SoC computing platforms. These third-party components may come with deliberate malicious implants to incorporate undesired functionality, undocumented test/debug interfaces working as a hidden backdoor, or other integrity issues. Since NoC facilitates communication between various components in an SoC, NoC is the ideal place for any malicious implants (such as hardware Trojans) to hide and launch a wide variety of security attacks. Due to the resource-constrained nature of many embedded and IoT devices, it may not be possible to employ traditional security solutions to protect NoC against malicious attacks. Specifically, there is a need for lightweight countermeasures that can secure NoC without violating any design constraints such as area, power, energy, and performance.