Reconfigurable Network-on-Chip Security Architecture

Growth of the Internet-of-things has led to complex system-on-chips (SoCs) being used in the edge devices in IoT applications. The increased complexity is demanding designers to consider several critical factors, such as dynamic requirement changes, long application life, mass production, and tight time-to-market deadlines. These requirements lead to more complex security concerns. SoC manufacturers outsource some of the intellectual property cores integrated on the SoC to untrusted third-party vendors. The untrusted intellectual properties can contain malicious implants, which can launch attacks using the resources provided by the on-chip interconnection network, commonly known as the network-on-chip (NoC). Existing efforts on securing NoC have considered lightweight encryption, authentication, and other attack detection mechanisms such as denial-of-service and buffer overflows. Unfortunately, these approaches focus on designing statically optimized security solutions. As a result, they are not suitable for many IoT systems with long application life and dynamic requirement changes. There is a critical need to design reconfigurable security architectures that can be dynamically tuned based on changing requirements. In this article, we propose a tier-based reconfigurable security architecture that can adapt to different use-case scenarios. We explore how to design an efficient reconfigurable architecture that can support three popular NoC security mechanisms (encryption, authentication, and denial-of-service attack detection and localization) and implement suitable dynamic reconfiguration techniques. We evaluate our proposed framework by running standard benchmarks enabling different tiers of security and provide a comprehensive analysis of how different levels of security can affect application performance, energy efficiency, and area overhead.