Detecting and Mitigating Low-and-Slow DoS Attacks in NoC-based MPSoCs

As Multi-Processor Systems-on-Chip (MPSoCs) permeate the Internet by powering IoT devices, they are exposed to new threats. One major threat is Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, which make communication services slow or even unavailable. While mainly studied on desktop and server systems, some DoS attacks on mobile devices and Network-on-Chip (NoC) platforms have also been considered. In the context of NoC-based MPSoC architectures, previous works have explored flooding DoS attacks and their countermeasures, however, these protection techniques are ineffective to mitigate new DoS attacks. Recently, a shift of the network attack paradigm from flooding DoS to Low-and-Slow DoS has been observed. To this end, we present two contributions. First, we demonstrate, for the first time, the impact of Low-and-Slow DoS attacks in NoC environments. Second, we propose a lightweight online monitor able to detect and mitigate these attacks. Results show that our countermeasure is feasible and that it effectively mitigates this new attack. Moreover, since the monitors are placed at the entry points of the network, both, single- and multi-source attacks can be neutralized.