Mitigation of tampering attacks for MR-based thermal sensing in optical NoCs

Abstract

As an emerging role in on-chip communication, the optical networks-on-chip (ONoCs) can provide ultra-high bandwidth, low latency and low power dissipation for the data transfer. However, the thermo-optic effects of the photonic devices have a great impact on the operating performance and reliability of ONoCs, where the thermal-aware control is used to alleviate it. Furthermore, the temperature-sensitive ONoCs are prone to be attacked by the hardware Trojans (HTs) covertly embedded in the integrated circuits (ICs) from the malicious third-party components, leading to performance degradation, denial of service (DoS), or even permanent damages. In this paper, we focus on the tampering attacks on optical sampling during the thermal sensing process in ONoCs. Corresponding approaches are proposed to mitigate the negative impacts from HT attacks. Evaluation results indicate that our approach can significantly enhance the hardware security of thermal sensing for ONoC with trivial overheads of up to 3.06% and 2.6% in average latency and energy consumption, respectively.