SoC security has become essential with devices now pervasive in
critical infrastructure in homes and businesses. Today’s embedded
SoCs are becoming increasingly high-performance and complex,
comprising multiple cores, accelerators, and IP blocks interconnected with a Network-on-Chip (NoC). As these IPs can originate
from diverse sources, they cannot be trusted to form the root of
trust in SoCs. However, the NoC itself, being the communication
backbone linking all IPs, is naturally positioned to be the basis for a
secure SoC. Therefore, there is a need for an efficient solution that
both meets the stringent requirements of modern embedded SoC
designs, while maintaining a high level of security.
In this paper, we demonstrate how statically-scheduled NoCs
inherently enforce traffic isolation and non-interference of communication. The time-division multiplexing (TDM) of NoC links
across applications provably ensures that security properties are fulfilled. However, conventional TDM NoCs are still vulnerable to sidechannel attacks. We thus propose temporal and data obfuscation
schemes that can be embedded within static TDM NoCs, randomizing source-destination communication patterns and switching
activity over the links. Our proposed statically-scheduled SentryNoC links up untrusted IP blocks to form a secure SoC. Sentry-NoC
targets key security properties to effectively mitigate side-channel
attacks with an extremely low overhead, reducing average temporal
correlation by 81% and average data correlation by 91%