Securing Photonic NoC Architectures from Hardware Trojans

The compact size and high wavelength selectivity of microring resonators (MRs) enable photonic networks-on-chip (PNoCs) to utilize dense-wavelength-division-multiplexing (DWDM) in photonic waveguides to attain high bandwidth on-chip data transfers. A Hardware Trojan in a PNoC can manipulate the electrical driving circuit of its MRs to cause the MRs to snoop data from the neighboring wavelength channels in a shared photonic waveguide. This introduces a serious security threat. This paper presents a framework that utilizes process variation based authentication signatures along with architecture-level enhancements to protect data in PNoCs from data-snooping Hardware Trojans. Evaluation results indicate that our approach can significantly enhance the hardware security in DWDM-based PNoCs with minimal overheads of up to 17.3% in average latency and of up to 15.2% in energy-delay-product (EDP).