Hardware Trojan Detection and Mitigation in NoC using Key authentication and Obfuscation Techniques

Today's Multiprocessor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) contains many cores and integrated circuits. Due to the current requirements of communication, we make use of Network-on-Chip (NoC) to obtain high throughput and low latency. NoC is a communication architecture used in the processor cores to transfer  data from source to destination through several nodes. Since NoC deals with on-chip interconnection for data transmission, it will be a good prey for data leakage and other security attacks. One such way of attacking is done by a third-party vendor introducing Hardware Trojans (HTs) into routers of NoC architecture. This can cause packets to traverse in wrong paths, leak/extract information and cause Denial-of-Service (DoS) degrading the system performance. In this paper, a novel HT detection and mitigation approach using obfuscation and key-based authentication technique is proposed. The proposed technique prevents any illegal transitions between routers thereby protecting data from malicious activities, such as packet misrouting and information leakage. The proposed technique is evaluated on a 4x4 NoC architecture under synthetic traffic pattern and benchmarks, the hardware model is synthesized in Cadence Tool with 90nm technology. The introduced Hardware Trojan affects 8% of packets passing through infected router. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed technique prevents those 10-15% of packets infected from the HT effect. Our proposed work has negligible power and area overhead of 8.6% and  2% respectively

Effectiveness of HT-assisted Sinkhole and Blackhole Denial of Service Attacks Targeting Mesh Networks-on-chip

There are ample opportunities at both design and manufacturing phases to meddle in a many-core chip system, especially its underlining communication fabric, known as the networks-on-chip (NoC), through the inclusion of malicious hardware Trojans (HT). In this paper, we focus on studying two specific HT-assisted Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, namely the sinkhole and blackhole attacks, that directly target the NoC of a many-core chip. As of the blackhole attacks, those intermediate routers with inserted HTs can stop forwarding data packets/flits towards the packets’ destination; instead, packets are either dropped from the network or diverted to some other malicious nodes. Sinkhole attacks, which exhibit similar attack effects as blackhole attacks, can occur when the NoC supports adaptive routing. In this case, a malicious node actively solicits packets from its neighbor nodes by pretending to have sufficient free buffer slots. Effects and efficiencies of both sinkhole and blackhole DoS attacks are modeled and quantified in this paper, and a few factors that influence attack effects are found to be critical. Through fine-tuning of these parameters, both attacks are shown to cause more damages to the NoC, measured as over 30% increase in packet loss rate. Even with current detection and defense methods in place, the packet loss rate is still remarkably high, suggesting the need of new and more effective detection and defense methods against the enhanced blackhole and sinkhole attacks as described in the paper

Security of Electrical, Optical and Wireless On-Chip Interconnects: A Survey

The advancement of manufacturing technologies has enabled the integration of more intellectual property (IP) cores on the same system-on-chip (SoC). Scalable and high throughput on-chip communication architecture has become a vital component in today's SoCs. Diverse technologies such as electrical, wireless, optical, and hybrid are available for on-chip communication with different architectures supporting them. Security of the on-chip communication is crucial because exploiting any vulnerability would be a goldmine for an attacker. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of threat models, attacks, and countermeasures over diverse on-chip communication technologies as well as sophisticated architectures.Comment: 41 pages, 24 figures, 4 table

Secure Network-on-Chip Against Black Hole and Tampering Attacks

The Network-on-Chip (NoC) has become the communication heart of Multiprocessors-System-on-Chip (MPSoC). Therefore, it has been subject to a plethora of security threats to degrade the system performance or steal sensitive information. Due to the globalization of the modern semiconductor industry, many different parties take part in the hardware design of the system. As a result, the NoC could be infected with a malicious circuit, known as a Hardware Trojan (HT), to leave a back door for security breach purposes. HTs are smartly designed to be too small to be uncovered by offline circuit-level testing, so the system requires an online monitoring to detect and prevent the HT in runtime. This dissertation focuses on HTs inside the router of a NoC designed by a third party. It explores two HT-based threat models for the MPSoC, where the NoC experiences packet-loss and packet-tampering once the HT in the infected router is activated and is in the attacking state. Extensive experiments for each proposed architecture were conducted using a cycle-accurate simulator to demonstrate its effectiveness on the performance of the NoC-based system. The first threat model is the Black Hole Router (BHR) attack, where it silently discards the packets that are passing through without further announcement. The effect of the BHR is presented and analyzed to show the potency of the attack on a NoC-based system. A countermeasure protocol is proposed to detect the BHR at runtime and counteract the deliberate packet-dropping attack with a 26.9% area overhead, an average 21.31% performance overhead and a 22% energy consumption overhead. The protocol is extended to provide an efficient and power-gated scheme to enhance the NoC throughput and reduce the energy consumption by using end-to-end (e2e) approach. The power-gated e2e technique locates the BHR and avoids it with a 1% performance overhead and a 2% energy consumption overhead. The second threat model is a packet-integrity attack, where the HT tampers with the packet to apply a denial-of-service attack, steal sensitive information, gain unauthorized access, or misroute the packet to an unintended node. An authentic and secure NoC platform is proposed to detect and countermeasure the packet-tampering attack to maintain data-integrity and authenticity while keeping its secrecy with a 24.21% area overhead. The proposed NoC architecture is not only able to detect the attack, but also locates the infected router and isolates it from the network

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

On a New Hardware Trojan Attack on Power Budgeting of Many Core Systems

In this paper, we study stealthy false-data attacks that exploit the vulnerabilities of power budgeting scheme in NoC, which can cause catastrophic denial of service (DoS) effects. Essentially, when a power budget request packet is routed through a Trojan-infected network-on-chip node's router, the power budget request can be unknowingly modified. The global manager then tends to make really bad power budget allocation decisions with all the tampered power requests it received. That is, legitimate applications will be victimized with lower power budgets than what they initially asked for, and thus, could suffer serious performance degradation; malicious applications, on the other hand, may be entitled to high power budgets and thus see performance boost that they do not deserve. Our study has shown that this new type of DoS attack can be initiated and sustained by a simple hardware Trojan (HT) circuit that is extremely hard to be detected. The effects of this new DoS attack are simulated using a network model, and all the major parameters and factors that impact the attack effects are identified and quantified

Integrated Photonic AI Accelerators under Hardware Security Attacks: Impacts and Countermeasures

Integrated photonics based on silicon photonics platform is driving several application domains, from enabling ultra-fast chip-scale communication in high-performance computing systems to energy-efficient optical computation in artificial intelligence (AI) hardware accelerators. Integrating silicon photonics into a system necessitates the adoption of interfaces between the photonic and the electronic subsystems, which are required for buffering data and optical-to-electrical and electrical-to-optical conversions. Consequently, this can lead to new and inevitable security breaches that cannot be fully addressed using hardware security solutions proposed for purely electronic systems. This paper explores different types of attacks profiting from such breaches in integrated photonic neural network accelerators. We show the impact of these attacks on the system performance (i.e., power and phase distributions, which impact accuracy) and possible solutions to counter such attacks

Emerging Security Threats in Modern Digital Computing Systems: A Power Management Perspective

Design of computing systems — from pocket-sized smart phones to massive cloud based data-centers — have one common daunting challenge : minimizing the power consumption. In this effort, power management sector is undergoing a rapid and profound transformation to promote clean and energy proportional computing. At the hardware end of system design, there is proliferation of specialized, feature rich and complex power management hardware components. Similarly, in the software design layer complex power management suites are growing rapidly. Concurrent to this development, there has been an upsurge in the integration of third-party components to counter the pressures of shorter time-to-market. These trends collectively raise serious concerns about trust and security of power management solutions. In recent times, problems such as overheating, performance degradation and poor battery life, have dogged the mobile devices market, including the infamous recall of Samsung Note 7. Power outage in the data-center of a major airline left innumerable passengers stranded, with thousands of canceled flights costing over 100 million dollars. This research examines whether such events of unintentional reliability failure, can be replicated using targeted attacks by exploiting the security loopholes in the complex power management infrastructure of a computing system. At its core, this research answers an imminent research question: How can system designers ensure secure and reliable operation of third-party power management units? Specifically, this work investigates possible attack vectors, and novel non-invasive detection and defense mechanisms to safeguard system against malicious power attacks. By a joint exploration of the threat model and techniques to seamlessly detect and protect against power attacks, this project can have a lasting impact, by enabling the design of secure and cost-effective next generation hardware platforms

A Comprehensive Study of the Hardware Trojan and Side-Channel Attacks in Three-Dimensional (3D) Integrated Circuits (ICs)

Three-dimensional (3D) integration is emerging as promising techniques for high-performance and low-power integrated circuit (IC, a.k.a. chip) design. As 3D chips require more manufacturing phases than conventional planar ICs, more fabrication foundries are involved in the supply chain of 3D ICs. Due to the globalized semiconductor business model, the extended IC supply chain could incur more security challenges on maintaining the integrity, confidentiality, and reliability of integrated circuits and systems. In this work, we analyze the potential security threats induced by the integration techniques for 3D ICs and propose effective attack detection and mitigation methods. More specifically, we first propose a comprehensive characterization for 3D hardware Trojans in the 3D stacking structure. Practical experiment based quantitative analyses have been performed to assess the impact of 3D Trojans on computing systems. Our analysis shows that advanced attackers could exploit the limitation of the most recent 3D IC testing standard IEEE Standard 1838 to bypass the tier-level testing and successfully implement a powerful TSV-Trojan in 3D chips. We propose an enhancement for IEEE Standard 1838 to facilitate the Trojan detection on two neighboring tiers simultaneously. Next, we develop two 3D Trojan detection methods. The proposed frequency-based Trojan-activity identification (FTAI) method can differentiate the frequency changes induced by Trojans from those caused by process variation noise, outperforming the existing time-domain Trojan detection approaches by 38% in Trojan detection rate. Our invariance checking based Trojan detection method leverages the invariance among the 3D communication infrastructure, 3D network-on-chips (NoCs), to tackle the cross-tier 3D hardware Trojans, achieving a Trojan detection rate of over 94%. Furthermore, this work investigates another type of common security threat, side-channel attacks. We first propose to group the supply voltages of different 3D tiers temporally to drive the crypto unit implemented in 3D ICs such that the noise in power distribution network (PDN) can be induced to obfuscate the original power traces and thus mitigates correlation power analysis (CPA) attacks. Furthermore, we study the side-channel attack on the logic locking mechanism in monolithic 3D ICs and propose a logic-cone conjunction (LCC) method and a configuration guideline for the transistor-level logic locking to strengthen its resilience against CPA attacks