Sec-NoC: A Lightweight Secure Communication System for On-Chip Interconnects

Modern multi-core processors use Network-on-Chip (NoC) as the communication backbone. With aggressive product release deadlines due to competition from peers, the usage of third-party intellectual property (IP) blocks for NoCs is a common practice. Hardware Trojans in NoC can lead to performance degradation and the exposure of sensitive information through data leakage. We address this problem by devising a secure, lightweight cryptosystem called Sec-NoC to be used for on-chip communications, ensuring confidentiality and integrity. The Sec-NoC implements authenticated packet encryption as well as an integrity check at network interfaces. The recovery from faults is facilitated by injecting NACKs and re-transmissions into the network. Unlike the existing works, a key-encapsulation method is also discussed for sharing the symmetric key between two nodes. Experimental results show that the Sec-NoC experiences a latency overhead of 1.3% only with minimal area and power overhead.