Using Pattern of On-Off Routers and Links and Router Delays to Protect Network-on-Chip Intellectual Property

Intellectual Property (IP) reuse is a well known practice in chip design processes. Nowadays, network-on-chips (NoCs) are increasingly used as IP and sold by various vendors to be integrated in a multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC). However, IP reuse exposes the design to IP theft, and an attacker can launch IP stealing attacks against NoC IPs. With the growing adoption of MPSoC, such attacks can result in huge financial losses. In this article, we propose four NoC IP protection techniques using fingerprint embedding: ON-OFF router-based fingerprinting (ORF), ON-OFF link-based fingerprinting (OLF), Router delay-based fingerprinting (RTDF), and Row delay-based fingerprinting (RWDF). ORF and OLF techniques use patterns of ON-OFF routers and links, respectively, while RTDF and RWDF techniques use router delays to embed fingerprints. We show that all of our proposed techniques require much less hardware overhead compared to an existing NoC IP security solution (square spiral routing) and also provide better security from removal and masking attacks. In particular, our proposed techniques require between 40.75% and 48.43% less router area compared to the existing solution. We also show that our solutions do not affect the normal packet latency and hence do not degrade the NoC performance.