Secure Communication with Peripherals in NoC-based Many-cores

Abstract

Many-core systems-on-chip (MCSoCs) contain pro-cessing elements (PEs), peripherals attached to the system, and an NoC connecting them. These systems have different flows traversing the NoC: PE-PE and PE-peripheral flows. Malicious hardware or software can hinder system security due to the resource sharing feature, such as CPU sharing for multitasking or sharing NoC links for flows belonging to different applications. Methods that isolate applications with security constraints, such as Secure Zones (SZs), protect PE-PE flows against most of the attacks reported in the literature. Proposals with methods to secure the communication with peripherals in the literature are scarce, with most of them focusing on shared memory protection. This paper presents an original approach, Secure Mapping with Access Point - SeMAP, which creates mapping policies for SZs, and communication strategies with IO devices, to protect PE-peripheral flows. Results show that the application execution time is not penalized by applying SeMAP, presenting advantages compared to a state-of-the-art approach. In terms of security, SeMAP successfully resisted an attack campaign, blocking malicious packets attempting to enter the SZ.