Packet security with path sensitization for NoCs

Hardware security is becoming a major concern as integrated circuits (IC) are exponentially growing thanks to technology scaling. With ICs reaching upwards of billions of transistors, detecting hardware trojans (HT) is like finding a needle in a haystack. Therefore, it becomes imperative to protect critical computing infrastructure from malicious attackers attempting to unearth vital information. Security enhancements should offer resiliency to limit their impact on overall chip performance as HTs are likely to slip through detection mechanisms. In this paper, we propose packet-security (P-Sec) a packet validation technique to protect compromised network-on-chip (NoC) architectures from fault injection side channel attacks and covert HT communication by merging two robust error detection schemes, namely algebraic manipulation detection (AMD) and cyclic redundancy check (CRC) codes. With P-Sec, applications containing sensitive and encrypted data can be protected from an ideal attacker using AMD codes at the cost of marginal area and power overhead in the network interface but with enhanced security on demand.