Network-on-chip router attacks and their prevention in MP-SoCs with multiple Trusted Execution Environments

NoC based high performance MP-SoCs can have multiple secure regions or Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). These TEEs can be separated by non-secure regions or Rich Execution Environments (REEs) in the same MP-SoC. All communications between two TEEs need to cross the in-between REEs. Without any security mechanisms, these traffic flows can face router attacks in REEs. Both routing table and routing logic based routers are vulnerable to such attacks. In this paper, we address attacks on routing tables. We propose two countermeasures - Run-time protector and Restart-time protector. In addition to detection and prevention, proposed protectors can locate a malicious router also. Synthesis results show that, the area of a Run-time protector and a Restart-time protector is only 6.6% and 2% of a conventional router area respectively.