Electronic, Wireless, and Photonic Network-on-Chip Security: Challenges and Countermeasures

TL;DR

This paper surveys security challenges and countermeasures in electronic, wireless, and photonic Network-on-Chip architectures, highlighting vulnerabilities and solutions in emerging manycore computing systems.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of security issues and defenses specific to advanced NoC paradigms like silicon photonics and wireless communication.

Findings

NoC vulnerabilities include hardware trojans and data snooping.

Emerging NoC technologies face unique security threats.

Countermeasures vary across electronic, wireless, and photonic NoCs.

Abstract

Networks-on-chips (NoCs) are an integral part of emerging manycore computing chips. They play a key role in facilitating communication among processing cores and between cores and memory. To meet the aggressive performance and energy-efficiency targets of machine learning and big data applications, NoCs have been evolving to leverage emerging paradigms such as silicon photonics and wireless communication. Increasingly, these NoC fabrics are becoming susceptible to security vulnerabilities, such as from hardware trojans that can snoop, corrupt, or disrupt information transfers on NoCs. This article surveys the landscape of security challenges and countermeasures across electronic, wireless, and photonic NoCs.