Lightweight Encryption and Anonymous Routing in NoC based SoCs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a lightweight encryption and anonymous routing protocol for NoC-based SoCs that significantly reduces performance overhead while maintaining security, addressing vulnerabilities from third-party IPs.

Contribution

It proposes a novel secret sharing mechanism for secure, anonymous routing in resource-constrained NoC-based SoCs, reducing overhead compared to traditional methods.

Findings

Achieves similar security with only 4% performance impact

Reduces performance degradation from 1.5X to minimal levels

Provides secure communication in resource-limited SoC environments

Abstract

Advances in manufacturing technologies have enabled System-on-Chip (SoC) designers to integrate an increasing number of cores on a single SoC. Increasing SoC complexity coupled with tight time-to-market deadlines has led to increased utilization of Intellectual Property (IP) cores from third-party vendors. SoC supply chain is widely acknowledged as a major source of security vulnerabilities. Potentially malicious third-party IPs integrated on the same Network-on-Chip (NoC) with the trusted components can lead to security and trust concerns. While secure communication is a well-studied problem in the computer networks domain, it is not feasible to implement those solutions on resource-constrained SoCs. In this paper, we present a lightweight encryption and anonymous routing protocol for communication between IP cores in NoC based SoCs. Our method eliminates the major overhead associated with traditional encryption and anonymous routing protocols using a novel secret sharing mechanism while ensuring that the desired security goals are met. Experimental results demonstrate that existing security solutions on NoC can introduce significant (1.5X) performance degradation, whereas our approach provides the same security features with minor (4%) impact on performance.