Security mechanisms to improve the availability of a Network-on-Chip

Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) are vulnerable to security attacks, which can degrade the network performance, reduce its availability or even block the entire network. In this context, this work aimed at increasing the availability of a NoC by means of the implementation of hardware-based mechanisms that filter malicious packets injected into the network by an attacking core. The mechanisms discard packets that affect the network availability, and regulate the injection rate of communication flows that attempt to consume a bandwidth higher than a limit specified by the system designer. The security mechanisms were described in VHDL and synthesized to an ASIC technology. Results demonstrate that they are effective in improving the network availability, with a reduced silicon overhead and low impact to the NoC performance.