Securing Network-on-Chips against Trojan-Induced Packet Duplication Attacks

Securing Network-on-Chips against Trojan-Induced Packet Duplication Attacks

연구 분야: Cryptography

학회: ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems, Volume 30, Issue 4

The third-party Intellectual Property (IP) supply chain exposes System-on-Chip designs to malicious implants like Hardware Trojans (HTs). With extremely rare trigger conditions, some HTs can evade conventional and even machine learning-based validation methods. Current detection and mitigation approaches fall short, especially against HTs capable of creating detrimental effects on cache and Network-on-Chip (NoC) performance. In this article, we present a novel intermittent and robust HT called LOKI, which primarily operates within the Network Adapter (NA) but can simultaneously impact the performance of the NoC, the shared cache, and the cores. LOKI is implanted in a malicious IP’s NA and triggers packet duplication attacks, leading to increased latency and performance degradation across the system. This action has cascading effects on the system, including increased latency in the NoC, adversely impacting communication efficiency. The duplication also leads to increased cache misses and longer miss penalties, further degrading cache performance. Additionally, LOKI affects the Instruction-Per-Cycle (IPC) of the cores, thus influencing overall processing performance. Our evaluation demonstrates that LOKI causes a 3.53× increase in packet latency, a 15% increase in miss penalty, and a 10% decrease in overall IPC. To neutralize the effects of HT-induced packet duplication, we propose a ubiquitous mitigation framework called HULK. HULK is installed in the NA and monitors all messages going in and out of the NoC, allowing it to address anomalies occurring in the NA, routers, and links. Experimental evaluation shows that HULK can effectively mitigate LOKI’s impact, achieving baseline system-like performance with negligible hardware overhead. Unlike existing HT-specific mitigation proposals, HULK serves as a generic solution to neutralize all types of packet duplication attacks. To promote reproducibility and community adoption, we have open sourced the implementation at https://github.com/itsmanju/hulk.