A Security Framework for NoC Using Authenticated Encryption and Session Keys

Network on Chip (NoC) is an emerging solution to the existing scalability problems with System on Chip (SoC). However, it is exposed to security threats like extraction of secret information from IP cores. In this paper we present an Authenticated Encryption (AE)-based security framework for NoC based systems. The security framework resides in Network Interface (NI) of every IP core allowing secure communication among such IP cores. The secure cores can communicate using permanent keys whereas temporary session keys are used for communication between secure and non-secure cores. A traffic limiting counter is used to prevent bandwidth denial and access rights table avoids unauthorized memory accesses. We simulated and implemented our framework using Verilog/VHDL modules on top of NoCem emulator. The results showed tolerable area overhead and did not affect the network performance apart from some initial latency.