Handling Packet Blocking Attack in NoC Using Traffic Snooping

Modern multiprocessors use Network-on-Chip (NoC) architecture for inter-core communication. As NoCs usually come as reconfigurable intellectual property blocks, malicious circuits such as Hardware Trojans (HT) in the NoC logic can alter the system's behaviour to deploy attacks like denial of service (DoS), bandwidth depletion, information leakage, etc. This paper examines a potential hardware Trojan attack on NoC routers, specifically targeting the switch arbitration phase. The proposed attack model introduces random delays for certain packets by disrupting the output of the switch arbitration phase. This imbalance in communication can result in denial of service attacks, causing performance degradation in IP cores. To counter this, we introduce a weighted delay-aware rerouting technique to detect and mitigate such HT attacks. The impact of these attacks includes increased latency and potential bottlenecks within the NoC router. Experimental results show that the latency of HT infected packets tends to increase by 20%, and the mitigation technique can maintain performance similar to baseline.