Paper Accepted at the International Conference on Availability, Reliability, and Security

Our paper “When Authenticated Encryption Meets Interleaved Error Correction Coding: Secure Networks-on-Chip Communication” has been accepted for publication at the International Conference on Availability, Reliability, and Security.

Abstract: In recent years, Networks-on-Chip has emerged as a flexible and powerful solution for data transmission in Multiprocessor System-on-Chip systems. However, the security of these systems may be threatened by Hardware Trojans (HTs) injected during manufacturing. In this paper, we focus on HTs that modify data during transmission. Due to the stealthy nature of HTs, it is a plausible assumption that only a few bits are modified. Hence, the use of Error Correcting Codes (ECC) to mitigate the impact of HTs have been investigated in the literature. However, ECC cannot detect every possible modification. On the other hand, authentication by means of cryptography can ensure the detection of any modification but requires a retransmission of the affected data. Within this paper, we investigate the combination of ECC and authentication in order to increase the reliability of data transmission while keeping the communication overhead low by avoiding retransmissions. We evaluated the efficiency and reliability of the proposed protocol using the PANACA simulation platform. The results of the comprehensive evaluation clearly show the advantages compared to the use of ECC or authentication alone.