NoC security using multipath routing

Title: Network-on-chip security using multipath routing Authors: Radu Stefan, Kees Goossens keywords: noc, multipath, security In a highly competitive consumer electronics industry, companies try to protect their IP and that of their customers from reverse-engineering attempts and sometimes they attempt to crate barriers against unauthorized use of their products in applications like Digital Rights Management or DRM. This task is made more difficult by the fact that the devices needing protection may be owned by the attackers themselves and can be physically probed. Technology scaling improves chip security by increasing the cost and technological requirements of an attacker, however several components like the interconnect, be it a conventional bus-based or a network-on-chip, remain susceptible to attacks as they usually employ long wires in the upper metal layers. In this study we propose a method of improving chip-level security by using multipath routing in networks-on-chip. The technique consists of splitting a communication channel over multiple paths in order to make it harder to intercept. The selection of paths can be either deterministic, known at design time, or indeterministic, for example based a hardware number generator. In both cases the technique is transparent for the user of the communication channel, which does not need any changes in terms of hardware, while only minimal additional hardware is required for the network interfaces.