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.
The line of work about NoC access control started with the Security Enhanced Communication Architecture (SECA) @cite_69 , a mechanism for monitoring and controlling bus data transfers using a variety of address- and value-based stateful and stateless policies. Those policies provide a high level of expressiveness at the cost of increased complexity compared to , which would complicate formal analysis. SECA is validated using a multi-core mobile phone SoC containing a cryptoprocessor that shares a RAM with the other cores and requires protection for its portion of the RAM.
@cite_69
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In this work, we propose and investigate the idea of enhancing a System-on-Chip (SoC) communication architecture (the fabric that integrates system components and carries the communication traffic between them) to facilitate higher security. We observe that a wide range of common security attacks are manifested as abnormalities in the system-level communication traffic. Therefore, the communication architecture, with its global system-level visibility, can be used to detect them. The communication architecture can also effectively react to security attacks by disallowing the offending communication transactions, or by notifying appropriate components of a security violation. We describe the general principles involved in a security-enhanced communication architecture (SECA) and show how several security objectives can be encoded in terms of policies that govern the inter-component communication traffic. We detail the implementation of SECA in the context of a popular commercial on-chip bus architecture (the AMBA architecture from ARM) through a combination of a centralized security enforcement module, and enhancements to the bus interfaces of system components. We illustrate how SECA can be used to enhance embedded system security in several application scenarios. A simple instance of SECA has been implemented in a commercial application processor SoC for mobile phones. We provide results of experiments performed to validate the proposed concepts through system-level simulation, and evaluate their overheads through hardware implementation using a commercial design flow.