Secure Multi-Path Routing with All-or-Nothing Transform for Network-on-Chip Architectures

TL;DR

This paper introduces a lightweight, multi-path routing framework with All-Or-Nothing Transform to enhance security in Network-on-Chip architectures, effectively preventing eavesdropping with minimal overhead.

Contribution

It proposes a novel AONT-based multi-path routing scheme that secures on-chip communication without significant resource overhead, improving upon traditional encryption methods.

Findings

Effectively mitigates eavesdropping attacks by malicious routers.

Achieves 7.3x reduction in security overhead compared to encryption.

Maintains low area and performance overhead in NoC architectures.

Abstract

Ensuring Network-on-Chip (NoC) security is crucial to design trustworthy NoC-based System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures. While there are various threats that exploit on-chip communication vulnerabilities, eavesdropping attacks via malicious nodes are among the most common and stealthy. Although encryption can secure packets for confidentiality, it may introduce unacceptable overhead for resource-constrained SoCs. In this paper, we propose a lightweight confidentiality-preserving framework that utilizes a quasi-group based All-Or-Nothing Transform (AONT) combined with secure multi-path routing in NoC-based SoCs. By applying AONT to each packet and distributing its transformed blocks across multiple non-overlapping routes, we ensure that no intermediate router can reconstruct the original data without all blocks. Extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that our method effectively mitigates eavesdropping attacks by malicious routers with negligible area and performance overhead. Our results also reveal that AONT-based multi-path routing can provide 7.3x reduction in overhead compared to traditional encryption for securing against eavesdropping attacks.