Effect of Hardware Trojan Attacks on the Performance of On-Chip Multicast Routing Algorithms

Due to the globalized IC market model, the chance of a third party vendor providing a compromised chip multiprocessor by embedding a Hardware Trojan (HT) is high. Multicast traffic becomes more common with the development of parallel applications and diverse programming models. In this paper, we study the effect of denial of service attacks launched by HTs on the performance of multicast routing algorithms. The HT model is proposed which exploits the on-chip temperature sensor information to identify the hotspot nodes and launch an attack on multicast packets to degrade the performance of the network-on-chip. We propose the hierarchical multicast routing algorithm which is an amalgamation of multiple unicast and dual-path routing algorithms. Simulation results confirm that the proposed algorithm is more resilient to this new type of attack than a multipath algorithm.