Packet Leak Detection on Hardware-Trojan Infected NoCs for MPSoC Systems

Packet leak on network-on-chip (NoC) is one of the key security concerns in the MPSoC design, where the NoC of the system can come from a third-party vendor and can be illegitimately implanted with hardware trojans. Those trojans are usually small so that they can escape the scrutiny of circuit level testing and perform attacks when activated. This paper targets the trojan that leaks packets to malicious applications by altering the packet source and destination addresses. To detect such a packet leak, we present a cost effective authentication design where the packet source and destination addresses are tagged with a dynamic random value and the tag is scrambled with the packet data. Our design has two features: 1) If the adversary attempts to play with tag to escape detection, the data in the packet may likely be changed -- hence invalidating the leaked packet; 2) If the attacker only alters the packet addresses without twiddling tag in the packet, the attack will be100% detected.