Your hardware is all wired up! Attacking network-on-chips via crosstalk channel

Abstract

Adjacent parallel wires appearing in the fabrication of 2D and 3D stacked integrated chips can be leveraged as a major source of crosstalk noise. A crosstalk may induce either erroneous data transmission, delayed, or speed-up signal transitions on such wires. In this paper, we show how corsstalk noise may be used by adversaries to attack both 2D and 3D Network-On-Chips (NoCs). The attack exploits the electrical couplings of adjacent wires in NoC links and intentionally disrupts control bits in the headers of packets. The proposed denial of service attack can create a notable number of packet loss and congested area over network if the network is not well-secured against crosstalk. Our joint evaluations using HSPICE along with Access Noxim simulator show that even crosstalk-prevention coding techniques cannot fully protect the system. The attack outcomes may range from packet loss, data error in packets, packet misroute, performance loss to global deadlock in the network that in which no packet is forwarded.