Protecting Network-on-Chip Intellectual Property Using Timing Channel Fingerprinting

The theft of Intellectual property (IP) is a serious security threat for all businesses that are involved in the creation of IP. In this article, we consider such attacks against IP for Network-on-Chip (NoC) that are commonly used as a popular on-chip scalable communication medium for Multiprocessor System-on-Chip. As a protection mechanism, we propose a timing channel fingerprinting method and show its effectiveness by implementing five different solutions using this method. We also provide a formal proof of security of the proposed method. We show that the proposed technique provides better security and requires much lower hardware overhead (64%–74% less) compared to an existing NoC IP security solution without affecting the normal packet latency or degrading the NoC performance.