Fortified-NoC: A Robust Approach for Trojan-Resilient Network-on-Chips to Fortify Multicore-Based Consumer Electronics

Consumer electronics hardware is designed and manufactured following a global supply chain which opens doors to their security challenges. Even with the advanced methods of formal verification and coverage analysis, there is still a chance of hiding malicious hardware/software which can degrade performance, leak data, or even stop functionalities. In this work, we present security solution of Network on Chip (NoC) based Multiprocessor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) consumer electronics (CE) systems such as set-top boxes and autonomous vehicles. Most of the existing methods targeted for such systems focus on protection in Network Interfaces (NI) and other software solutions rather than routers against Hardware Trojans (HT) which can be embedded in NoC by a rogue designer. In this work, we propose a 3-tier methodology leading to “Fortified-NoC” to secure the data and resources against different kinds of threats. A Trojan cognizant routing algorithm (TCRA) is proposed which limits the HTs to a particular router that contains them. Data shuffling with Trojan detectability is also used to mislead and identify the HTs. We validated the proposed approach using various experiments. Our proposed method is capable of mitigating the Trojan attacks such as data leakage, performance degradation, denial of service and live locking of data packets at the cost of a little latency and, some extra hardware. It is able to recover more than 80% of lost packets, improve the throughput by
$1.3\times $
against performance degrading Trojan attacks.