Real-Time Detection and Localization of Distributed DoS Attacks in NoC-Based SoCs

Network-on-chip (NoC) is widely employed by multicore system-on-chip (SoC) architectures to cater to their communication requirements. Increasing NoC complexity coupled with its widespread usage has made it a focal point of potential security attacks. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) is one such attack that is caused by malicious intellectual property (IP) cores flooding the network with unnecessary packets causing significant performance degradation through NoC congestion. In this article, we propose an efficient framework for real-time detection and localization of DDoS attacks. This article makes three important contributions. We propose a real-time and lightweight DDoS attack detection technique for NoC-based SoCs by monitoring packets to detect any violations. Once a potential attack has been flagged, our approach is also capable of localizing the malicious IPs using the latency data in the NoC routers. The applications are statically profiled during design time to determine communication patterns. These patterns are then used for real-time detection and localization of DDoS attacks. We have evaluated the effectiveness of our approach against different NoC topologies and architecture models using both real benchmarks and synthetic traffic patterns. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach is capable of real-time detection and localization of DDoS attacks originating from multiple malicious IPs in NoC-based SoCs.