Implementation of a reconfigurable data protection module for NoC-based MPSoCs

Security issues are emerging to be a basic concern in modern SoC development. Since in the field of on-chip interconnections the security problem continues to remain mostly an unexplored topic, this paper proposes a novel technique for data protection that uses the communication subsystem as basis. The proposed architecture works as a firewall managing the memory accesses on the basis of a lookup table containing the access rights. This module, called Data Protection Unit (DPU), has been designed for MPSoC architectures and integrated in the Network Interfaces near the shared memory. We implement the DPU inside an MPSoC architecture on FPGA and we add features to the module to be aware of dynamic reconfiguration of the system software. Starting from a general overview of our design down to components’ structure, we introduce the place and the role of the DPU module inside the system for a reconfigurable secure implementation of a MPSoC on FPGA. The description of the DPU concept, its implementation, and integration into the system are described in detail. Finally, the architecture is fully implemented on FPGA and tested on a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro board.