Mobile devices are in roles where the integrity and confidentiality of their apps and data are of paramount importance. They usually contain a System-on-Chip (SoC), which integrates microprocessors and peripheral Intellectual Property (IP) connected by a Network-on-Chip (NoC). Malicious IP or software could compromise critical data. Some types of attacks can be blocked by controlling data transfers on the NoC using Memory Management Units (MMUs) and other access control mechanisms. However, commodity processors do not provide strong assurances regarding the correctness of such mechanisms, and it is challenging to verify that all access control mechanisms in the system are correctly configured. We propose a NoC Firewall (NoCF) that provides a single locus of control and is amenable to formal analysis. We demonstrate an initial analysis of its ability to resist malformed NoC commands, which we believe is the first effort to detect vulnerabilities that arise from NoC protocol violations perpetrated by erroneous or malicious IP.
Some NoC protection mechanisms have been developed commercially, but the details of their designs and the analysis processes that have been applied to them are not publicly available. Texas Instruments has applied for a patent on hardware technology that includes the ability to restrict bus accesses and execute operating systems in isolation on virtual cores @cite_16 .
@cite_16
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Systems-on-chip (SoCs) based on many core architectures can be attacked. Malicious processes can infer secrets from on-chip sensible traffic by evaluating the degradation on their communication performance. Such a threat rises from the resource sharing. In order to avoid such time-driven attacks, the network-on-chip (NoC) can integrate mechanisms to isolate different communication flows. In this letter, we propose two mechanisms, random arbitration and adaptive routing, that dynamically allocate the SoC resources to avoid such attacks. We compare our approach to the unique previous work under several traffic conditions. We demonstrate that our mechanisms are effective to protect the SoC while increasing the overall performance. For many embedded systems, data protection is becoming a major issue. On those systems, processors are often heterogeneous and prevent from deploying a common, trusted hypervisor on all of them. Multiple native software stacks are thus bound to share the resources without protection between them. NoC-MPU is a Memory Protection Unit allowing to support the secure and flexible co-hosting of multiple native software stacks running in multiple protection domains, on any shared memory MP-SoC using a NoC. This paper presents a complete hardware architecture of this NoC-MPU mechanism, along with a software trusted model organization. Executing multiple applications on a single MPSoC brings the major challenge of satisfying multiple quality requirements regarding real-time, energy, and so on. Hybrid application mapping denotes the combination of design-time analysis with run-time application mapping. In this article, we present such a methodology, which comprises a design space exploration coupled with a formal performance analysis. This results in several resource reservation configurations, optimized for multiple objectives, with verified real-time guarantees for each individual application. The Pareto-optimal configurations are handed over to run-time management, which searches for a suitable mapping according to this information. To provide any real-time guarantees, the performance analysis needs to be composable and the influence of the applications on each other has to be bounded. We achieve this either by spatial or a novel temporal isolation for tasks and by exploiting composable networks-on-chip (NoCs). With the proposed temporal isolation, tasks of different applications can be mapped to the same resource, while, with spatial isolation, one computing resource can be exclusively used by only one application. The experiments reveal that the success rate in finding feasible application mappings can be increased by the proposed temporal isolation by up to 30 and energy consumption can be reduced compared to spatial isolation. This paper presents a first solution for NoC-based communication security. Our proposal is based on simple network interfaces implementing distributed security rule checking and a separation between security and application channels. We detail a four- step security policy and show how, with usual NOC techniques, a designer can protect a reconfigurable SOC against attacks that result in abnormal communication behaviors. We introduce a new kind of relative and self-complemented street-sign routing adapted to path-based IP identification and reconfigurable architectures needs. Our approach is illustrated with a synthetic set-top box, we also show how to transform a real-life bus-based security solution to match our NOC-based architecture