Hierarchical NoC-based security for MP-SoC dynamic protection

Abstract — MPSoCs are able to support multiple applications on the same chip. This flexibility offered by the MPSoC also represents a vulnerability, turning the MPSoC security specially challenging. The goal of the designers is to provide MPSoC protection that meets the performance and security requirements of all the applications. The Network-on-chip (NoC) interconnection structure can be used to efficiently overcome the present MPSoC vulnerabilities. In this paper, we present the implementation of a hierarchical security NoC-based architecture to detect and prevent a wide range of MPSoC attacks. We integrate agile and dynamic security firewalls into the NoC in order to detect attacks based on different security rules. It uses the QoSS (Quality of Security Service) concept. It takes into account the tradeoff between security and performance. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach over several MPSoCs attack scenarios and estimate their impact on the overall performance. We show that our architecture can perform a fast detection of a wide range of attacks and a fast configuration of the different security policies for several MPSoC applications. Keywords-security; network-on-chip; Multi-Processor SoC; QoSS (Quality-of-Security-Service