Role based shared memory access control mechanisms in NoC based MP-SoC

Publication date: Available online 2 December 2015 Source:Nano Communication Networks Author(s): Arnab Kumar Biswas, S.K. Nandy Security is becoming one of the main aspects of Multiprocessor System-on-Chip (MP-SoC) design. Software attacks, the most common type of attacks, mainly exploit vulnerabilities like buffer overflow. This is possible if proper access control to memory is absent in the system. In this paper, we propose three hardware based mechanisms to implement Role Based Access Control (RBAC) model in Network-on-Chip (NoC) based MP-SoC. According to our knowledge, our solutions are the first attempts to implement hardware based solutions based on RBAC model. All the three proposed mechanisms use Resource Access Manager (RMAN) in a shared memory MP-SoC. Processing element (PE) connected routers of the NoC are retrofitted with a module called Local Access Manager (LMAN). Three proposed access control mechanisms are central, hybrid, and local depending upon the location of the access control decisions taken. The proposed mechanisms ensure confidentiality and availability in the whole MP-SoC i.e they not only can detect and prevent unauthorized access attack but can prevent denial-of-service attack too. The largest area increase of a PE connected router (for hybrid case) is only 8.6% compared to a normal router. Experimental results show that in most of the cases, proposed mechanisms have similar average memory access latencies compared to a normal NoC. Only dra...

Source: Nano Communication Networks - December 2, 2015 Category: Nanotechnology Source Type: research