Denial-of-Service Attack Detection using Machine Learning in Network-on-Chip Architectures

State-of-the-art System-on-Chip (SoC) designs consist of many Intellectual Property (IP) cores that interact using a Network-on-Chip (NoC) architecture. SoC designers increasingly rely on global supply chains for obtaining third-party IPs. In addition to inherent vulnerabilities associated with utilizing third-party IPs, NoC based SoCs enable attackers to exploit the distributed nature of NoC and its connectivity with various IPs to launch a plethora of attacks. Specifically, Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks pose a serious threat in degrading the SoC performance by flooding the NoC with unnecessary packets. In this paper, we present a machine learning-based runtime monitoring mechanism to detect DoS attacks. The models are statically trained and used for runtime attack detection leading to minimum runtime performance overhead. Our approach is capable of detecting DoS attacks with high accuracy, even in the presence of unpredictable NoC traffic patterns caused by various application mappings. We extensively explore machine learning models and features to provide a comprehensive study on how to use machine learning for DoS attack detection in NoC-based SoCs.