Evaluating the cost to cipher the NoC communication

The trend in the semiconductor industry is to present more highly dense and functional MPSoC due to the increasing demand for interconnected devices (e.g., Internet of Things). In this context, these devices are holding an increasing amount of personal data from its users. With the goal of protecting users against attacks, this paper proposes a secure architecture and provides the costs of increasing the security for Networks-on-Chip (NoCs). The architecture is composed of a firewall capable of filtering incoming and outgoing network traffic and encrypting sensitive information performing end-to-end security using an AES cipher block. The Firewall plus the AES increases the router area by 193.7% and latency increases in the worst-case scenario 395.92%. Despite this performance penalty, the traffic is protected against attacks. Considering that the injection rate of applications is small (typically 5–10%), a small performance overhead at the application level is expected.