NoC, NoC: Your Chip May Be Under Attack

By SemiWiki

January 6, 2014

SoCs face a lot of issues related to security and the Network-on-Chip (NoC) is in a good position to facilitate system-wide services. SoCs are now so complex that one of the challenges is to make sure that the chip does what it is meant to do and doesn't do what it isn't meant to do. Just as in software, security used to be largely ignored when doing a chip design but with all the latest revelations about the NSA (and others) you can't just assume your blocks have no security holes and that it impossible to run malicious code on your control processor.

Chips are vulnerable to attack in all sorts of subtle ways as well as the obvious ones of violating security policies such as writing out encryption keys to non-secure areas. Just as a website is vulnerable to DDOS attack (distributed denial of service) IP blocks on a chip are vulnerable to starvation, forced errors and unauthorized access.

Sonics has a broad set of security features in its products SSX and SGN that can be used in conjunction with error management to enable content protection, core hijacking prevention, and denial of service protection and thus ensure that an SoC cannot be compromised.

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