Security Enhancements for building saturation-free, low-power NoC-based MPSoCs

In the future almost every consumer electronics device will be connected to an ecosystem of third-party partners providing services such as payment, streaming content, and so on. Present work aims to expose the foundations of a secure environment by ensuring security on the edge devices. MPSoCs are widely used in edge devices due to their capability to execute multiple applications in single-chips. To achieve the targeted security level against physical adversaries, all communications between the MPSoC and its environment must be protected. In an MPSoC multiple processing elements such as CPUs send requests to different on-chip memories. Network-on-chip has been proposed for MPSoC design, aiming at increasing performance and reducing power compared to on-chip buses. Tailoring the NoC to application(s) takes place usually at design-time. The selection of NoC parameter values affects both performance and power, while configuring them unwisely can result in unnecessary area overhead and chip cost. In the present work we concentrate on a commercial interconnect called STNoC from STMicroelectronics. We keep the NoC parameters fixed, and we explore the effects from the variation of other parameters, such as the injection rate of the packets transmitted by the CPUs, and the activation/deactivation of a security mechanism integrated in the network interface of the NoC, for multiple traffic scenarios with each one representing different amount of legal and malicious requests, for different mappings, and for different node setups. Experimental results, reveal the conditions under which the NoC starts experiencing saturation phenomena.