DoSGuard: Protecting pipelined MPSoCs against hardware Trojan based DoS attacks

Abstract

Billions of transistors on a chip and the power wall made embedded systems to be designed with Multiprocessor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) architectures. One utilization of MPSoCs is the Pipelined MPSoCs (PMPSoCs). As many reliable and safety critical systems are deployed with MPSoCs, denying their service would have adverse effects. One such possibility is the insertion of a hardware Trojan that performs Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. DoSGuard present a novel PMPSoC architecture that continues its execution in the presence of DoS Trojans in Third Party Intellectual Property (3PIP) cores. DoSGuard deploys two methods; one can detect the presence of Trojans and recover, and the other can also identify the 3PIPs under attack using buffer delays. While the state of the art incurs 3× area and power overheads, DoSGuard consumes 1.5M+3 area and leakage power (M is the number of cores in the base system) and a small (the power consumption of the monitoring system) dynamic power overheads. On a cycle accurate commercial multiprocessor simulator, DoSGuard takes 531 clock cycles to detect a DoS attack. With DoSGuard the throughput reduction due to a DoS attack varies with the application and the monitoring interval but is negligible (< 10−3%) for real world scenarios, where millions of iterations take place.