Abstract
Intellectual property (IP) has been used in Network on chips (NoCs) for reducing costs and shortening the time to market. However, there is a probability that a third-party vendor injects hardware that behaves maliciously. This study firstly illustrates the security risk of a hardware Trojan for eavesdropping and reducing the system performance by malicious coherent messages. It only increases the amounts of communications and calculations obeying a coherence protocol, allowing applications to perform correctly. This study secondly presents its countermeasure at network interfaces. It compares the number of output messages to input messages at network interfaces to detect malicious coherent messages. This risk causes, on a chip-multiprocessor, execution time to increase by up to 24%, the amount of traffic to increase by up to 18%, and the energy consumption to increase by up to 8.9%. Since the benchmarks in the evaluation are small, we expect that real-life applications would be highly affected by the hardware Trojan. Our countermeasure avoids these performance degradation, and it can be implemented with a significantly low overhead of only 1.3% in a network interface on a chip.
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Notes
- 1.
The word “owner” appears frequently in this study. This is not the owner of the owned status in the coherent status, but it is used in the sense of “having the final write back responsibility to the lower cache hierarchy”. Therefore, “the owner core of the data corresponding to a specific address” refers to both the owner of the data corresponding to the address in the owner status and the only core that caches the data corresponding to the address in the modified status in the coherent status.
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This work was partly supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 19H01106.
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Shikama, Y., Koibuchi, M., Amano, H. (2023). A Hardware Trojan Exploiting Coherence Protocol on NoCs. In: Takizawa, H., Shen, H., Hanawa, T., Hyuk Park, J., Tian, H., Egawa, R. (eds) Parallel and Distributed Computing, Applications and Technologies. PDCAT 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13798. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29927-8_24
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