Real-time Detection and Localization of DoS Attacks in NoC based SoCs

Network-on-Chip (NoC) is widely employed by multi-core System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures to cater to their communication requirements. The increased usage of NoC and its distributed nature across the chip has made it a focal point of potential security attacks. Denial-of-Service (DoS) is one such attack that is caused by a malicious intellectual property (IP) core flooding the network with unnecessary packets causing significant performance degradation through NoC congestion. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and real-time DoS attack detection mechanism. Once a potential attack has been flagged, our approach is also capable of localizing the malicious IP using latency data gathered by NoC components. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with timely attack detection and localization while incurring minor area and power overhead (less than 6% and 4%, respectively).