Enhancing the security of time-division-multiplexing networks-on-chip through the use of multipath routing

After gaining popularity as a method of authentication in the form of smart cards, electronic security mechanisms are making their way into the domain of embedded domain with the goal of protecting Intellectual Property or for Digital Rights Management. A key role in implementing security at chip-level is played by the interconnect, which has the task of providing and regulating the flow of data between an increasing number of on-chip elements, not all of which can be considered trustworthy. Networks-on-Chip are emerging as a scalable solution for modern on-chip communication. In this study we aim to improve NoC security by forcing the messages to be routed on multiple disjoint paths, optionally in a non-deterministic manner. We implement our proposal and find it to have a reasonably low cost in terms of hardware area, although potentially having a larger overhead in terms of allocated bandwidth.