Securing on-Chip Communication Using Digital Watermarking

Abstract

System-on-chip (SoC) developers utilize Intellectual Property (IP) cores from third-party vendors due to increasing design complexity, cost as well as time-to-market constraints. A typical SoC consists of a wide variety of IP cores (such as processor, memory, controller, FPGA, etc.) that interact using a Network-on-Chip (NoC). This global trend of designing SoCs using third-party IPs raises serious concerns about security vulnerabilities. Since NoC facilitates communication between all IPs in an SoC, NoC is the ideal place for any malicious implants (such as hardware Trojans) to hide and launch a plethora of attacks. Due to the resource-constrained nature of SoCs, developing security solutions against such attacks is a major challenge. In particular, in an eavesdropping attack, a Trojan-infected router copies packets transferred through the NoC and re-routes the duplicated packets to an accompanying malicious application running on another IP in an attempt to extract confidential information. While authenticated encryption can thwart such attacks, it leads to performance and energy overhead in resource-constrained SoCs. In this chapter, we discuss a lightweight alternative defense based on digital watermarking techniques. The method is theoretically analyzed to evaluate its security. Experiments using realistic SoC models and diverse applications demonstrate that the approach can mitigate eavesdropping attacks while incurring minor overhead.