Attack Mitigation of Hardware Trojans for Thermal Sensing via Micro-ring Resonator in Optical NoCs

Abstract

As an emerging role in new-generation on-chip communication, optical networks-on-chip (ONoCs) provide ultra-high bandwidth, low latency, and low power dissipation for data transfers. However, the thermo-optic effects of the photonic devices have a great impact on the operating performance and reliability of ONoCs, where the thermal-aware control with accurate measurements, e.g., thermal sensing, is typically applied to alleviate it. Besides, the temperature-sensitive ONoCs are prone to be attacked by the hardware Trojans (HTs) covertly embedded in the counterfeit integrated circuits (ICs) from the malicious third-party vendors, leading to performance degradation, denial-of-service (DoS), or even permanent damages. In this article, we focus on the tampering and snooping attacks during the thermal sensing via micro-ring resonator (MR) in ONoCs. Based on the provided workflow and attack model, a new structure of the anti-HT module is proposed to verify and protect the obtained data from the thermal sensor for attacks in its optical sampling and electronic transmission processes. In addition, we present the detection scheme based on the spiking neural networks (SNNs) to implement an accurate classification of the network security statuses for further high-level control. Evaluation results indicate that, with less than 1% extra area of a tile, our approach can significantly enhance the hardware security of thermal sensing for ONoC with trivial costs of up to 8.73%, 5.32%, and 6.14% in average latency, execution time, and energy consumption, respectively.

Security of Electrical, Optical and Wireless On-Chip Interconnects: A Survey

“…In hybrid optical NoCs, electrical NoC is used to send these control signals. Zhou et al [89] talks about attack on confidentiality when sending optical NoC control signal data (thermal sensing values) through insecure electrical NoC.…”

“…As discussed earlier, optical networks are sensitive to temperature since thermal sensing is integrated into optical NoCs. Zhou et al [88,89] outline an attack that tampers the thermal-sensing control procedure of MRs. The optical router is the focal point of this attack where the thermalsensing measurement is happening.…”

“…Zhou et al [89] also talk about possible spoofing attack in thermal sensing control procedure. As discussed in Section 5.1.2, the optical router measures the raw data for temperature calculation.…”

“…The complete solution for addressing multiple security requirements incur only 1.6% area overhead and 14.2% performance overhead while eavesdropping only solution incurs even less overhead. In a hybrid optical NoC, Zhou et al [89] use an encryption scheme to ensure confidentiality of control messages transfer via electrical NoC. The fabrication of optical NoC introduces Process Variations.…”

“…Zhou et al [89] discuss on adding module to check optical sampling during thermal sensing. This module is implemented in the network interface of Electrical NoC because it will not affect the normal optical network communication.…”