A non-intrusive and reconfigurable access control to secure NoCs

Following the current trend in the semiconductor industry (MPSoC) and the massive advances presented by all things interconnected (Internet of Things), a massive quantity of private and metadata is being transferred through insecure channels. In the industry, almost no attention is given to the amount of data that can be collected from different individuals, just by getting access to their house appliances. With that in mind, this paper proposes a non-intrusive and reconfigurable access control architecture for Networks-on-Chip (NoCs). This architecture comprises firewalls, which are capable of filtering both incoming and outgoing network traffic by analyzing packet information and verifying a traffic initiator´s access permission, providing a secure environment that is capable of protecting the user data. The firewalls have approximately 12% of the router area. When the number of routers increases, the firewall area overhead grows slightly, up to only 16% in NoCs with 64 routers.