Multilayer NoC Firewall Services: Case-Study on E-Health

Network-on-Chip (NoC) Firewall provides memory protection and process isolation. In this paper, we design, implement and validate hierarchical Linux security primitives on top of a custom NoC Firewall module embedded on the ARM-based Xilinx Zedboard FPGA. Our open-source, multi-layer security protocols aim to protect the privacy of application keys stored in non-cacheable BRAM. Experimental results derived from integrating security within a soft real-time electrocardiogram monitoring, analysis, and visualization application allow evaluating the software overhead of the proposed security primitives. Preliminary results indicate that the performance overhead for supporting data privacy is acceptable for one-time authentication schemes. However, relative to the processing requirements of the E-Health application, security overheads are large, and cannot sustain continuous authentication schemes.