Sec-NoC: A Lightweight Secure Communication System for On-Chip Interconnects

Abstract

Modern multicore processors use network-on-chip (NoC) as the communication backbone. With aggressive product release deadlines due to competition from peers, the usage of third-party intellectual property (IP) blocks for NoCs is a common practice. Hardware Trojans in NoC can lead to performance degradation and the exposure of sensitive information through data leakage. We address this problem by devising a secure, lightweight cryptosystem called secure NoC (Sec-NoC) to be used for on-chip communications, ensuring confidentiality and integrity. The Sec-NoC implements authenticated packet encryption as well as an integrity check at network interfaces. The recovery from faults is facilitated by injecting NACKs and retransmissions into the network. Unlike the existing works, a key-encapsulation method is also discussed for sharing the symmetric key between two nodes. Experimental results show that the Sec-NoC experiences a latency overhead of 1.3% only with minimal area and power overhead.