Spoofing prevention via RF power profiling in wireless network-on-chip

With increasing integration in SoCs, the Network-on-Chip (NoC) connecting of cores and accelerators is of paramount importance to provide low-latency and high-throughput communication. Due to limits of scaling of electrical wires, especially for long multi-mm distances on-chip, alternate technologies such as Wireless NoC (WNoC) have shown promise. Since WNoCs can provide low-latency one-hop transfers across the entire chip, there has been a recent surge in research demonstrating their performance and energy benefits. However, little to no work has studied the additional security challenges that are unique to WNoCs. In this work, we study the potential threat of spoofing attacks in WNoCs due to malicious hardware trojans. We introduce Veritas, a drop-in solution aimed at detecting and correcting such spoofing attacks. To this end, our solution exploits the static propagation environment of WNoCs to associate each node to a power profile. We demonstrate that, with small area and power overheads, Veritas works well in a variety of settings.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft