Spotlight: An Impairing Packet Transmission Attack Targeting Specific Node in NoC-based TCMP

As the communication infrastructure utilized by Tiled Chip Multicore Processors (TCMP), Network-on-Chip (NoC) has been subject to serious security vulnerabilities due to hardware Trojans (HTs) concealed in potentially insecure 3PIPs. To satisfy the need for secure NoCs, it is vital to model potential attacks and analyze their impacts on NoC performance. This paper proposes a novel and covert HT model called Spotlight targeting specific victim node in XY-routing NoC to optimize the attacking effect. By inserting Trojans into special nodes and modifying the arbiters of input ports within the switch allocator of router, packets flowing to the victim node are unfairly treated causing considerable latency. As a result, the HT effectively degrades the transmission of packets while having a subtle impact on other NoC performance. The proposed HT is inserted into Garnet 2.0 of Gem5 simulator for performance evaluation. Experimental results indicate that the Spotlight attack increased the average delay of target packets by 12.16 cycles. Compared to some DoS attacks, the proposed Trojan affected packet transmission with fewer packets, causing minimal fluctuates in NoC metrics such as average latency. And the area and power overheads are only 0.94% and 0.11%, respectively.