A Customized Authentication Design for Traffic Hijacking Detection on Hardware-Trojan Infected NoCs

Abstract

Traffic hijacking is a common attack perpetrated on networked systems, where attackers eavesdrop on user transactions, manipulate packet data, and divert traffic to illegitimate locations. Similar attacks can also be unleashed in a NoC (Network on Chip) based system where the NoC comes from a third-party vendor and can be engrafted with hardware Trojans. Unlike the attackers on a traditional network, those Trojans are usually small and have limited capacity. This paper targets such a hardware Trojan; Specifically, the Trojan aims to divert traffic packets to unauthorized locations on the NoC. To detect this kind of traffic hijacking, we propose an authentication scheme in which the source and destination addresses are tagged. We develop a custom design for the packet tagging and authentication such that the implementation costs can be greatly reduced. Our experiments on a set of applications show that on average the detection circuitry incurs about 3.37% overhead in area, 2.61% in power, and 0.097% in performance when compared to the baseline design.