Integrated photonics based on silicon photonics platform is driving several application domains, from enabling ultra-fast chip-scale communication in high-performance computing systems to energy-efficient optical computation in artificial intelligence (AI) hardware accelerators. Integrating silicon photonics into a system necessitates the adoption of interfaces between the photonic and the electronic subsystems, which are required for buffering data and optical-to-electrical and electrical-to-optical conversions. Consequently, this can lead to new and inevitable security breaches that cannot be fully addressed using hardware security solutions proposed for purely electronic systems. This paper explores different types of attacks profiting from such breaches in integrated photonic neural network accelerators. We show the impact of these attacks on the system performance (i.e., power and phase distributions, which impact accuracy) and possible solutions to counter such attacks.
Authored by Felipe De Magalhaes, Mahdi Nikdast, Gabriela Nicolescu
Integrated photonics based on silicon photonics platform is driving several application domains, from enabling ultra-fast chip-scale communication in high-performance computing systems to energy-efficient optical computation in artificial intelligence (AI) hardware accelerators. Integrating silicon photonics into a system necessitates the adoption of interfaces between the photonic and the electronic subsystems, which are required for buffering data and optical-to-electrical and electrical-to-optical conversions. Consequently, this can lead to new and inevitable security breaches that cannot be fully addressed using hardware security solutions proposed for purely electronic systems. This paper explores different types of attacks profiting from such breaches in integrated photonic neural network accelerators. We show the impact of these attacks on the system performance (i.e., power and phase distributions, which impact accuracy) and possible solutions to counter such attacks.
Authored by Felipe De Magalhaes, Mahdi Nikdast, Gabriela Nicolescu
The continuously growing importance of today’s technology paradigms such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and the new 5G/6G standard open up unique features and opportunities for smart systems and communication devices. Famous examples are edge computing and network slicing. Generational technology upgrades provide unprecedented data rates and processing power. At the same time, these new platforms must address the growing security and privacy requirements of future smart systems. This poses two main challenges concerning the digital processing hardware. First, we need to provide integrated trustworthiness covering hardware, runtime, and the operating system. Whereas integrated means that the hardware must be the basis to support secure runtime and operating system needs under very strict latency constraints. Second, applications of smart systems cover a wide range of requirements where "one- chip-fits-all" cannot be the cost and energy effective way forward. Therefore, we need to be able to provide a scalable hardware solution to cover differing needs in terms of processing resource requirements.In this paper, we discuss our research on an integrated design of a secure and scalable hardware platform including a runtime and an operating system. The architecture is built out of composable and preferably simple components that are isolated by default. This allows for the integration of third-party hardware/software without compromising the trusted computing base. The platform approach improves system security and provides a viable basis for trustworthy communication devices.
Authored by Friedrich Pauls, Sebastian Haas, Stefan Kopsell, Michael Roitzsch, Nils Asmussen, Gerhard Fettweis
Network on Chip Security - With the advancements in VLSI technology, Tiled Chip Multicore Processors (TCMP) with packet switched Network-on-Chip (NoC) have emerged as the backbone of the modern data intensive parallel multi-core systems. Tight timeto-market and cost constraints have forced chip manufacturers to use third-party IPs in sophisticated TCMP designs. This dependence over third party IPs has instigated security vulnerabilities in inter-tile communication that cannot be detected at manufacturing and testing phases. This includes possibility of having malicious circuits like Hardware Trojans (HT). NoC is the likely target of HT insertion due to its significance and positional advantage from system and communication standpoints. Recent research shows that HTs can manipulate control fields of NoC packets and leads to dead flit attacks that has the potential to disrupt the on-chip communication resulting in application level stalling. In this paper, we propose run time detection of such dead flit attacks by analyzing packet movement behaviours. We also propose a cost effective mitigation mechanism by re-routing the packets around the HT infected router. Our experimental study with real benchmarks on 8x8 mesh TCMP evaluates the effectiveness of the proposed solution.
Authored by Mohammad Khan, Ruchika Gupta, Vedika Kulkarni, John Jose, Sukumar Nandi
Network on Chip Security - Due to the increasing complexity of modern heterogeneous System-on-Chips (SoC) and the growing vulnerabilities, security risk assessment and quantification is required to measure the trustworthiness of a SoC. This paper describes a systematic approach to model the security risk of a system for malicious hardware attacks. The proposed method uses graph analysis to assess the impact of an attack and the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) is used to quantify the security level of the system. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed metric, we consider two open source SoC benchmarks with different architectures. The overall risk is calculated using the proposed metric by computing the exploitability and impact of attack on critical components of a SoC.
Authored by Sujan Saha, Joel Mbongue, Christophe Bobda
Network on Chip Security - In recent times, Network-on-Chip (NoC) has become state of the art for communication in Multiprocessor Systemon-Chip due to the existing scalability issues in this area. However, these systems are exposed to security threats such as extraction of secret information. Therefore, the need for secure communication arises in such environments. In this work, we present a communication protocol based on authenticated encryption with recovery mechanisms to establish secure end-to-end communication between the NoC nodes. In addition, a selected key agreement approach required for secure communication is implemented. The security functionality is located in the network adapter of each processing element. If data is tampered with or deleted during transmission, recovery mechanisms ensure that the corrupted data is retransmitted by the network adapter without the need of interference from the processing element. We simulated and implemented the complete system with SystemC TLM using the NoC simulation platform PANACA. Our results show that we can keep a high rate of correctly transmitted information even when attackers infiltrated the NoC system.
Authored by Julian Haase, Sebastian Jaster, Elke Franz, Diana Göhringer
Network on Chip Security - Without secure wrappers, it is impossible to protect the integrity of embedded IP cores for NoC-based SoC. This paper describes an IEEE 1500 compatible secure test wrapper NoC based on low-cost PUF circuit. The original key generated by LFSR is encrypted into a stream cipher by the PUF module, and the input key string should be equal to this cryptograph unless the wrapper is locked, which provides effective on-line authentication.
Authored by Ying Zhang, Yuanxiang Li, Xin Chen, Jizhong Yang, Yifeng Hua, Jiaoyan Yao
Network on Chip Security - This paper designs a network security protection system based on artificial intelligence technology from two aspects of hardware and software. The system can simultaneously collect Internet public data and secret-related data inside the unit, and encrypt it through the TCM chip solidified in the hardware to ensure that only designated machines can read secret-related materials. The data edgecloud collaborative acquisition architecture based on chip encryption can realize the cross-network transmission of confidential data. At the same time, this paper proposes an edge-cloud collaborative information security protection method for industrial control systems by combining endaddress hopping and load balancing algorithms. Finally, using WinCC, Unity3D, MySQL and other development environments comprehensively, the feasibility and effectiveness of the system are verified by experiments.
Authored by Xiuyun Lu, Wenxing Zhao, Yuquan Zhu
Network on Chip Security - Soft real-time applications, including multimedia, gaming, and smart appliances, rely on specific architectural characteristics to deliver output in a time-constrained fashion. Any violation of application deadlines can lower the Quality-of-Service (QoS). The data sets associated with these applications are distributed over cores that communicate via Network-on-Chip (NoC) in multi-core systems. Accordingly, the response time of such applications depends on the worst-case latency of request/reply packets. A malicious implant such as Hardware Trojan (HT) that initiates a delay-of-service attack can tamper with the system performance. We model an HT that mounts a time-delay attack in the system by violating the path selection strategy used by the adaptive NoC router. Our analysis shows that once activated, the proposed HT increases the packet latency by 17\% and degrades the system performance (IPC) by 18\% over the Baseline. Furthermore, we propose an HT detection framework that uses packet traffic analysis and path monitoring to localise the HT. Experiment results show that the proposed detection framework exhibits 4.8\% less power consumption and 6.4\% less area than the existing technique.
Authored by Manju Rajan, Mayank Choksey, John Jose
Network on Chip Security - IoT technology is finding new applications every day and everywhere in our daily lives. With that, come new use cases with new challenges in terms of device and data security. One of such challenges arises from the fact that many IoT devices/nodes are no longer being deployed on owners’ premises, but rather on public or private property other than the owner’s. With potential physical access to the IoT node, adversaries can launch many attacks that circumvent conventional protection methods. In this paper, we propose Secure SoC (SecSoC), a secure system-on-chip architecture that mitigates such attacks. This include logical memory dump attacks, bus snooping attacks, and compromised operating systems. SecSoC relies on two main mechanisms, (1) providing security extensions to the compute engine that runs the user application without changing its instruction set, (2) adding a security management unit (SMU) that provide HW security primitives for encryption, hashing, random number generators, and secrets store (keys, certificates, etc.). SecSoC ensures that no secret or sensitive data can leave the SoC IC in plaintext. SecSoC is being implemented in Bluespec SystemVerilog. The experimental results will reveal the area, power, and cycle time overhead of these security extensions. Overall performance (total execution time) will also be evaluated using IoT benchmarks.
Authored by Ayman Hroub, Muhammad Elrabaa
Network on Chip Security - The Network-on-Chip (NoC) is the communication heart in Multiprocessors System-on-Chip (MPSoC). It offers an efficient and scalable interconnection platform, which makes it a focal point of potential security threats. Due to outsourcing design, the NoC can be infected with a malicious circuit, known as Hardware Trojan (HT), to leak sensitive information or degrade the system’s performance and function. An HT can form a security threat by consciously dropping packets from the NoC, structuring a Black Hole Router (BHR) attack. This paper presents an end-to-end secure interconnection network against the BHR attack. The proposed scheme is energy-efficient to detect the BHR in runtime with 1\% and 2\% average throughput and energy consumption overheads, respectively.
Authored by Luka Daoud, Nader Rafla
Network on Chip Security - Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Arrays (CGRA) implemented using FPGA are widely applied due to the portability and compatibility. As an evolvable hardware (EHW) platform, it also faces hardware security problems, among which hardware Trojans (HTs) is the most prominent threat. HTs are malicious hardware components. Once implanted in the route units (RUs) of the network-on-chip (NoC) in CGRA, it will leak confidential information or destroy the entire system. However, few studies have focused on HT mitigation in RUs of NoC in CGRA. To this end, we present an evolutionary algorithm (EA)-based method to mitigate HT attacks in NoC of CGRA. Specifically, we employ the EA to explore generating the circuit structures that do not contain HT-infected RUs. In the simulation experiments built using Python, this paper reports the experimental results for two target evolutionary circuits in NoC and outlines the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Authored by Zeyu Li, Junjie Wang, Zhao Huang, Quang Wang
Middleware Security - Online advertisements are a significant element of the Internet ecosystem. Businesses monitor their customers via pushing advertising (Ads). Within minutes, cybercriminals try to defraud and steal data through advertisements. Therefore, the issue of ads must be solved. Ads are obtrusive, a security risk, and they hinder performance and efficiency. Hence, the goal is to create an ad-blocker that would operate across the entire network and prevent advertisement on any website s web pages. To put it another way, it s a little computer with such a SoC (System - On - chip) also referred to as a Raspberry Pi that is merged with a networking system, for which we need to retrain the advertisements. On the home network, software named Pi Hole is used to block websites with advertisements. Any network traffic that passes via devices connected to the home network now passes through the Pi. As a result, the adverts are finally checked out during the Raspberry Pi before they reach the users machine and they will be blocked.
Authored by Harshal Sonawane, Manasi Patil, Shashank Patil, Uma Thakur, Bhavin Patil, Abha Marathe
In recent times, Network-on-Chip (NoC) has become state of the art for communication in Multiprocessor System-on-Chip due to the existing scalability issues in this area. However, these systems are exposed to security threats such as extraction of secret information. Therefore, the need for secure communication arises in such environments. In this work, we present a communication protocol based on authenticated encryption with recovery mechanisms to establish secure end-to-end communication between the NoC nodes. In addition, a selected key agreement approach required for secure communication is implemented. The security functionality is located in the network adapter of each processing element. If data is tampered with or deleted during transmission, recovery mechanisms ensure that the corrupted data is retransmitted by the network adapter without the need of interference from the processing element. We simulated and implemented the complete system with SystemC TLM using the NoC simulation platform PANACA. Our results show that we can keep a high rate of correctly transmitted information even when attackers infiltrated the NoC system.
Authored by Julian Haase, Sebastian Jaster, Elke Franz, Diana Göhringer
Soft real-time applications, including multimedia, gaming, and smart appliances, rely on specific architectural characteristics to deliver output in a time-constrained fashion. Any violation of application deadlines can lower the Quality-of-Service (QoS). The data sets associated with these applications are distributed over cores that communicate via Network-on-Chip (NoC) in multi-core systems. Accordingly, the response time of such applications depends on the worst-case latency of request/reply packets. A malicious implant such as Hardware Trojan (HT) that initiates a delay-of-service attack can tamper with the system performance. We model an HT that mounts a time-delay attack in the system by violating the path selection strategy used by the adaptive NoC router. Our analysis shows that once activated, the proposed HT increases the packet latency by 17% and degrades the system performance (IPC) by 18% over the Baseline. Furthermore, we propose an HT detection framework that uses packet traffic analysis and path monitoring to localise the HT. Experiment results show that the proposed detection framework exhibits 4.8% less power consumption and 6.4% less area than the existing technique.
Authored by Manju Rajan, Mayank Choksey, John Jose
The security of manycore systems has become increasingly critical. In system-on-chips (SoCs), Hardware Trojans (HTs) manipulate the functionalities of the routing components to saturate the on-chip network, degrade performance, and result in the leakage of sensitive data. Existing HT detection techniques, including runtime monitoring and state-of-the-art learning-based methods, are unable to timely and accurately identify the implanted HTs, due to the increasingly dynamic and complex nature of on-chip communication behaviors. We propose AGAPE, a novel Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based anomaly detection and mitigation method against HTs for secured on-chip communication. AGAPE learns the distribution of the multivariate time series of a number of NoC attributes captured by on-chip sensors under both HT-free and HT-infected working conditions. The proposed GAN can learn the potential latent interactions among different runtime attributes concurrently, accurately distinguish abnormal attacked situations from normal SoC behaviors, and identify the type and location of the implanted HTs. Using the detection results, we apply the most suitable protection techniques to each type of detected HTs instead of simply isolating the entire HT-infected router, with the aim to mitigate security threats as well as reducing performance loss. Simulation results show that AGAPE enhances the HT detection accuracy by 19%, reduces network latency and power consumption by 39% and 30%, respectively, as compared to state-of-the-art security designs.
Authored by Ke Wang, Hao Zheng, Yuan Li, Jiajun Li, Ahmed Louri
The Network-on-Chip (NoC) is the communication heart in Multiprocessors System-on-Chip (MPSoC). It offers an efficient and scalable interconnection platform, which makes it a focal point of potential security threats. Due to outsourcing design, the NoC can be infected with a malicious circuit, known as Hardware Trojan (HT), to leak sensitive information or degrade the system’s performance and function. An HT can form a security threat by consciously dropping packets from the NoC, structuring a Black Hole Router (BHR) attack. This paper presents an end-to-end secure interconnection network against the BHR attack. The proposed scheme is energy-efficient to detect the BHR in runtime with 1% and 2% average throughput and energy consumption overheads, respectively.
Authored by Luka Daoud, Nader Rafla
This paper designs a network security protection system based on artificial intelligence technology from two aspects of hardware and software. The system can simultaneously collect Internet public data and secret-related data inside the unit, and encrypt it through the TCM chip solidified in the hardware to ensure that only designated machines can read secret-related materials. The data edge-cloud collaborative acquisition architecture based on chip encryption can realize the cross-network transmission of confidential data. At the same time, this paper proposes an edge-cloud collaborative information security protection method for industrial control systems by combining end-address hopping and load balancing algorithms. Finally, using WinCC, Unity3D, MySQL and other development environments comprehensively, the feasibility and effectiveness of the system are verified by experiments.
Authored by Xiuyun Lu, Wenxing Zhao, Yuquan Zhu
With the development of computer technology and information security technology, computer networks will increasingly become an important means of information exchange, permeating all areas of social life. Therefore, recognizing the vulnerabilities and potential threats of computer networks as well as various security problems that exist in reality, designing and researching computer quality architecture, and ensuring the security of network information are issues that need to be resolved urgently. The purpose of this article is to study the design and realization of information security technology and computer quality system structure. This article first summarizes the basic theory of information security technology, and then extends the core technology of information security. Combining the current status of computer quality system structure, analyzing the existing problems and deficiencies, and using information security technology to design and research the computer quality system structure on this basis. This article systematically expounds the function module data, interconnection structure and routing selection of the computer quality system structure. And use comparative method, observation method and other research methods to design and research the information security technology and computer quality system structure. Experimental research shows that when the load of the computer quality system structure studied this time is 0 or 100, the data loss rate of different lengths is 0, and the correct rate is 100, which shows extremely high feasibility.
Authored by Yuanyuan Hu, Xiaolong Cao, Guoqing Li